I have been in product management for fifteen years. I am the person teams come to when they need clarity. I am the one who remembers the meeting from three months ago and what was decided and who said what. That memory, that particular sharpness, was not something I thought about. It was just who I was.
And then, at 42, it started leaving.
Not all at once. Slowly. I would be mid-sentence in a presentation and the word I needed, a completely normal professional word I had used a hundred times, would simply not be there. I would pause. Look at the screen. Keep talking around it. Nobody noticed, or if they did, they were polite enough not to say anything.
But I noticed. Every single time.
I started over-preparing. I wrote detailed notes for every meeting. I sent myself voice memos with things I needed to remember. I arrived fifteen minutes early to every call to review what had been discussed. I was doing the work of two brains just to perform at the level one brain used to manage automatically.
The worst part was not the forgetting itself. It was the fear underneath the forgetting. My father had Alzheimer's. I watched what that took from him, and from us. When my memory started slipping, that fear sat behind every blank moment like a shadow.
When I finally brought it up with a doctor, a psychiatrist I had been seeing for what I thought was burnout, she said something I will not forget: this is not progressive. It does not get worse over time the way Alzheimer's does. It fluctuates. Worse some weeks, better others. That alone tells you it is not what you are afraid of.
Perimenopause brain fog fluctuates. Dementia does not. That distinction saved me months of quiet, private terror.
I am still in product management. Still the person teams come to. I still write more notes than I used to, and I have made peace with that. The sharpness has come back, not completely, not always, but enough to know I did not lose myself. I just went through something that nobody told me was coming.