Nobody Told Me It Could Happen at 38

I found out I was in perimenopause the same week my daughter turned seven. She was blowing out her candles and I was standing behind her thinking: something is very wrong with me and I do not know what.

It had been building for almost a year. The sleep, or the complete absence of it. Waking at 3am completely alert, heart going faster than it should, mind already running through everything I had not done, every bill, every school form, every unanswered message. Lying there for two hours before giving up. Getting through the day on three hours of sleep and two cups of coffee and a kind of desperation I had no name for.

The rage was the thing I am least proud of. Not anger. Rage. Sudden, disproportionate, frightening to me as much as to anyone else. My husband would leave a cup on the wrong shelf and something would rise in me that felt completely out of scale. I would see it happening and not be able to stop it. Afterwards I would feel so ashamed. So unlike myself.

What Was Happening in Divya's Body

Oestrogen falling Triggers a drop in serotonin, the brain chemical responsible for mood stability

Progesterone falling first Reduces GABA, the calming neurotransmitter. The emotional buffer thins

Small triggers, big reactions The nervous system cannot absorb frustration the way it used to. This is chemistry, not character

3am waking Cortisol patterns shift in perimenopause, producing early waking with a racing mind

I thought it was depression. My mother had it, I had watched it from close enough to be afraid of it my whole adult life. I went to see a psychiatrist. She was thorough and careful and after two sessions she said: before we go further, I want to rule out a hormonal cause. Have you seen a gynaecologist recently?

I had not. Why would I? I was 38.

The gynaecologist explained perimenopause to me the way you explain something to someone who has never heard of it, which I essentially had not, not as something that could happen to me. I had always thought of it as a distant event. Post-50. After your children left home. Not now, in the middle of everything.

What nobody tells you is that it can start in your late 30s. That early perimenopause is not rare. That the symptoms, the sleep, the mood, the brain that stops cooperating, can arrive years before your periods change significantly. I wish I had known that earlier. I wish someone had said it out loud so that when it arrived, I would have recognised it instead of spending a year being frightened of myself.

I am in a better place now. Not a perfect place. I am not sure perfect exists anymore. But I know what is happening. And knowing, it turns out, is most of the battle.

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