The tears come before I have decided to cry.
I am sitting in a chair I have sat in a hundred times, except always on the other side of it. I am the one who usually holds the clipboard. I am the one who says the careful sentence I have said to so many women, the one that goes, what you are describing has a name, and there are things we can do. Today I am the patient. And when the words finally land, something in my chest gives way, and the tears come down before I can arrange my face into the expression I have worn my whole life.
I want to tell you the whole of it. Not the tidy version. The real one. The year I disappeared, and the year I came back, because I need you to know that both halves are true. The dark is real. And so is the light. You are not meant to stay in the dark, and I am living proof that you do not have to.
To tell you how I ended up in that chair, I have to take you back about a year, to the season I started to disappear.
It began with my memory. That sounds small. Let me tell you why it was not.
My brain was my superpower. It was the thing I trusted when I did not trust anything else about myself. Quick, witty, fluent, fast. I speak four languages, and I used to move between them without effort, the words always there when I reached for them. If something lit me up, I kept it, sharp and easy, the way some people catch a ball without thinking.
And then, slowly, the words were not there.
It started with names. Then new information I could not seem to hold. Then the terminology of my own profession, the vocabulary I had recited every day for years, suddenly sitting just out of reach. The word would be right there, on the tip of my tongue, present and absent at the same time, and I would stand in the exam room feeling it hover somewhere in a building whose hallways I no longer recognized.
This is the part women type into a search bar at midnight. Perimenopause brain fog. Can’t focus. Can’t find my words. Why do I feel like this. For most people, forgetting a word is an annoyance. For me it was the floor falling away.
So I did what I have always done. I compensated. Women like me are experts at it. We stack one workaround on top of the last, so smoothly that we assume everyone lives this way. I thought everyone had forty tabs open in their mind at all times. I thought everyone walked into a room and forgot why, and simply figured it out.
But this time the compensating stopped working.
I want to name the feelings, because no one named them for me, and the not naming is its own kind of cruelty.
There was grief. I began to mourn the woman I used to be while she was still standing in my own body. I would catch a glimpse of her, the quick reply, the version of me people knew, arriving too late, and I would watch her leave the room before I could catch her. You do not expect to attend the funeral of yourself while you are still alive. I did.
There was loneliness, and it was the worst of it. Because the fog does not announce itself. From the outside I looked fine. I was still working, still showing up, still smiling on cue. Nobody could see that inside I was searching for words like a woman patting the walls of a dark room for a light switch. You feel like the only one. You feel like you cannot explain it without sounding dramatic, or lazy, or too much. So you say nothing, and the silence makes the loneliness bigger.
There was the flat grey. Not sadness exactly. The absence of color. The joy that used to arrive on its own just stopped arriving. The mood swings, the irritability that came from nowhere, the anxiety that sat on my chest at 3am for no reason I could point to. I did not recognize the woman I had become, and I could not find my way back to the one I had been.
And there was the darkest thought, the one I did not say out loud to anyone for a long time.
I thought I had early dementia.
I want to be honest about that, because I know I am not the only woman who has lain awake at 3am doing the math on her own mind. Certain that something was being taken from her. Too frightened to say the word. If you have thought it too, I am not going to look away from it. I thought it in that chair, in that dark, for months.
This is the moment so many women are dismissed. You go in. You say you do not feel like yourself. Your labs come back normal, and you are told you are fine, maybe a little stressed, maybe you should sleep more. And you walk out feeling crazy, because your body is screaming and the paper says nothing is wrong. Normal is not the same as well. I need you to hear that twice. Your labs can come back normal while you feel like a stranger in your own body.
The night it finally lifted did not feel like a diagnosis. It felt like a door.
I was awake, again, and somewhere in the quiet it occurred to me that I had been looking at this the wrong way around. The forgetting, the fog, the flat grey, the sleep that would not come, the weight that would not move, the anxiety. I had been treating each one as its own small failure. What if they were not separate at all. What if they were one thing, with a name I said to other women all the time and had never once said to myself.
Perimenopause.
The hormones that had steadied me my whole life were shifting. Estrogen, progesterone, the quiet chemistry that had been holding the scaffolding up for forty five years, was changing. And as it changed, it surfaced something I had hidden so well that even I could not see it. ADHD. Carried my whole life without a name, the way you can carry a stone in your shoe for so long that you forget walking is supposed to feel like anything else.
I prescribe this. I have recognized in patient after patient the exact thing I could not see in myself. For a while I thought that meant I had failed. I understand it differently now. It is not that I was a bad clinician. It is that women like us become so good at hiding that the hiding turns invisible, even to ourselves. We do not recognize the mask, because the mask has been our face for as long as we can remember.
Here is what I felt when the words landed, and I did not expect the second one. Grief, yes. But underneath the grief, relief. A long exhale I did not know I had been holding since I was a little girl. Oh, I thought. It was real. I was not lazy, or dramatic, or too much, or not enough. There was a reason. The grief and the relief arrived in the same breath, holding hands, and I let them both come.
Then we went to work. And this is the part I most need you to hear, because it is the part no one tells you when you are still in the dark.
We steadied my hormones with bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, the safe, modern options that give the body back the chemistry it lost. We treated the mind I had spent my whole life hiding. And I waited, because a part of me did not believe I could actually come back.
It did not return all at once. It came the way morning does, so slowly you only notice once the room is already full of light. One day I reached for a word and it was simply there. Then another. My own mind, handed back to me. I sat in my car and cried, because I had not felt like myself in so long that I had forgotten what she felt like.
And then something happened that I truly did not see coming. I did not just get her back. I got someone better.
Because here is the truth about the other side. You do not return as a smaller, more careful version of who you were. You return hormone optimized, yes, steady and clear and sleeping again, the anxiety quiet, the weight responding, the fog gone. But you also return as the woman all of it made you. More confident. More experienced. Less willing to shrink. I no longer settle for the old version of what people expected me to be, and I no longer spend my energy managing what they think, because now I know exactly who I am, what I want, and what I will and will not accept.
That is the part that surprised me most. I did not come back as a younger woman. I came back as a truer one, and a stronger one. We are not just surviving this passage. We are not going back to being the shell of who we were. We are arriving. And once you are optimized, once you are cared for by the right provider with the right tools, you are not bracing for decline anymore. You are only getting better. Clearer, freer, more yourself, more sure. The best is not behind us. The best is genuinely ahead, and it keeps arriving, again and again.
That is what I want for you. Not just relief from the dark, although the relief is real and it is enormous. I want you to feel what I feel now, which is that the woman on the other side of this is someone worth becoming.
You are not imagining it. You are not too far in, and you are not too late. The chemistry that shifted in you can be restored, safely and with real care. The despair you feel right now is not a fixed address. It is a season, and seasons end.
You do not have to sit in the dark place anymore, hoping someone finally believes you. There are safe options. There is a way through that is gentle and evidence based and built around the whole of you, not a single number on a lab sheet. The right provider changes everything, because when someone finally sees the whole picture, the fog lifts, the fear quiets, and the future stops looking like something to survive and starts looking like something to want.
I built the practice I always wished I had, one that sees the whole woman, because I have been where you are, and I know the way home. And I promise you this. From the right place, with the right care, we only get better and better from here.
There is room for you here. Pull up a chair.
If you recognize yourself in this, you can begin your application at vieorahealth.com, or come find me at @wahibanp and @vieorahealth.