What If Perimenopause Is an Invitation?

Sleep is disrupted. Energy fades. Emotions feel like a complete disaster—the rage is real.

Brain fog rolls in. Words disappear mid-sentence (that one's fun). You walk into a room and forget why you're there.

Your body begins responding in ways you don’t recognize, and suddenly it feels unfamiliar.

It’s confusing.

And it’s fucking hard.

And if you’re anything like me, you head straight to trying to figure out how to get back to where you were.

You ask yourself:

What am I doing wrong?

How do I fix this?

What am I forgetting?

How do I get my body back?

Am I actually just going crazy?

But what if we’re asking the wrong questions?

What if perimenopause isn’t asking you to get your old body back?

What if it’s an invitation?

An invitation to come home to the woman within you –the one who has been quietly waiting all along.

Waiting for you to slow down.

Waiting for you to ask questions.

Waiting for you to listen.

Waiting for you to honor her.

A wise woman once told me that every relationship is simply one long conversation. So when the communication stops, the relationship stops.

I think one of the most important conversations we’ll ever have is the one we have with our own bodies.

But most of us were never taught how to have a relationship with it. Some of us once innately knew, as little girls. But somewhere along the way, and often when we were way too young, we stopped listening.

Instead, we became really good at detaching from our bodies, judging them, and giving instructions. We were taught how to manage them –how to shrink them, how to improve them, and control them. We were never taught how to become curious about them and to honor what our bodies were trying to communicate.

I’ve spent much of my life learning (and unlearning) what it means to be in a relationship with my body, and like every relationship, it has changed and grown over time.

By the time I was five years old, my mom was in a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis. I grew up competitively dancing and vividly remember thinking around ten years old, I get to leap and jump, and my mom can’t walk. It gave me this deep appreciation for my body and what it could do.

But I also watched my mom’s confidence change as her illness changed her body, and it made me realize how closely women can tie their identity and self-worth to their bodies.

As I got older and found myself modeling full time, I learned quickly what agencies wanted and what clients preferred. I knew exactly how my body looked –but I knew very little about how it felt, how I felt.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t really in a relationship with my body.

I had a relationship with managing my body.

Somewhere along the way, my measurements quietly became my measure of worth, and every day became another attempt to become just a little bit better. But you don’t have to spend twenty years in the modeling industry to know this feeling.

I see it in women everywhere.

Maybe your body wasn’t your career. Maybe it was the years spent pinching your waist in the mirror. The diets that always started on Monday. The jeans you promised yourself you’d fit back into. The vacation

photos you quietly/discreetly sat out of.

Different stories. Same relationship.

There are many seasons that change our bodies. Pregnancy. Motherhood. Illness. Grief. Aging.

But there is one that almost all of us will eventually walk through: Perimenopause.

There is something profoundly different about this season.

Unlike so many of the body changes we’ve experienced before, perimenopause doesn’t simply ask us to adapt to a changing body. The body that once tolerated being ignored no longer does. She asks to be heard. It asks us to reimagine the relationship we’ve been having with it all along. Maybe that’s why it feels so disorienting. Because perhaps this isn’t simply a hormonal transition.

Perhaps it’s an invitation.

An invitation to stop fighting our bodies and begin listening to them. To become curious instead of critical. To ask different questions. To honor needs we’ve spent years dismissing. To set boundaries we’ve been afraid to set.

To come home to the woman you’ve always been beneath the expectations, the performance, and all the versions of yourself you thought you had to become in order to be enough.

Maybe that’s why so many women begin asking deeper questions during this season.

Who am I now?

What do I actually want?

What matters most?

Somewhere along the way, many of us become experts at abandoning ourselves. We say yes when we mean no. We answer one more email. We volunteer one more time. We care for everyone else before we care for ourselves. We push through exhaustion because that’s what we’ve always done. We become so busy caring for everyone else that we slowly lose the conversation happening inside ourselves.

Then something fascinating begins to happen.

Our bodies and souls (very loudly) begin asking for what it has needed all along: rest, nourishment, space, stillness, honesty.

It asks you to notice what you’ve been overriding. To pay attention to the conversation you’ve been missing. To finally listen.

So perhaps your body isn’t betraying you. Maybe she’s finally telling you the truth. And maybe, for the first time in a long time, she’s asking you to trust her. That’s what makes this season so powerful. Not because it’s easy. Not because it isn’t disruptive. But because it asks us to stop living against ourselves.

To stop seeing our bodies as projects to perfect, and start experiencing them as partners to understand by being in a supportive, compassionate and understanding relationship with them.

The word no begins to come a little easier. The things that once felt like obligations begin to feel like choices. Things that once felt urgent quietly fall away. People-pleasing becomes more exhausting than disappointing someone. Boundaries begin to feel less like selfishness and more like self-respect.

I’ve watched so many women apologize for who they’re becoming during this season.

“I’m just not the same person anymore.”

“I’m more emotional.”

“I don’t have the patience I used to.”

“I don’t have the energy I used to.”

But what if that’s only part of the story?

What if you’re not becoming less yourself? What if you’re becoming less willing to abandon yourself? To self-sacrifice yourself?

Maybe that’s the invitation.

Not to become someone new.

But to finally come home to yourself.