It was not a doctor who first told me what was happening to me. It was Farida, my friend of thirty years, across a table at our usual tea place, watching me fan myself with the menu for the third time.
She put down her cup and said, very simply, how old are you now, and how are your periods. I told her, a little surprised. She nodded slowly and said, I think you are in perimenopause. I went through it two years ago. Nobody tells you. So I am telling you.
I had been to two doctors by then. One had checked my thyroid and found nothing and sent me home. One had suggested I was stressed. Neither had said the word my oldest friend said to me over tea, without any medical degree, simply because she had lived it and paid attention.
What Farida gave me that afternoon was not a diagnosis, exactly. She could not prescribe anything. What she gave me was recognition, and with it, permission. Permission to stop doubting myself. Permission to go back to a doctor and say, clearly, I think this is perimenopause, and I would like it taken seriously.
And that is what I did. Armed with the word, and with my friend's certainty behind me, I found a gynaecologist and said exactly that. It changed the entire tone of the appointment. She listened, she tested properly, and within a week I had the answer that two earlier visits had failed to give me.
But the deeper gift was realising how much we, as women, know that never gets passed on. Farida had gone through this two years before me, in silence, telling almost no one. If she had not chosen, that day, to break her own silence, I might have spent another year lost.
So we started talking. Really talking. In my boutique, between customers, with the women who come in around our age, I have started saying the word out loud, the way Farida said it to me. And again and again I watch a face change, the way mine must have changed, as someone realises there is a name for what they have been carrying alone.
Doctors matter. Tests matter. But sometimes the thing that saves you is an old friend who has been where you are, choosing not to stay quiet. I try to be that friend now, to as many women as I can. It costs nothing, and it gives back everything.