Читать книгу Be Your Own Change Guru: The Ultimate Women's Guide for Thriving at Midlife - Susan Paget - Страница 3

This book was literally written under the influence of perimenopause.

I'd wake up at 3:00 am (the midlife Witching Hour!), and when I knew that all the tossing and turning in the world wasn’t going to get me back to sleep, I’d drag my tired but wired butt out of bed, shuffle into the living room and open up my laptop.

Like some bizarre magnet, I felt as if something was pulling at me to get up and Google words and phrases like “perimenopause” or “midlife” or “I’m 47, what the hell is going on with me?” I was on a mission. I wanted to get to the bottom of what life was all about when we found ourselves at its halfway point.

Some force was compelling me to uncover whatever it was I was going through. To be honest, I didn’t know what was happening to me. The only thing crystal clear was that something was going on and I couldn’t find the words to explain it. It was like I’d landed in a new city where I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t have a map and to be honest, the locals weren’t very friendly.

But rather than be daunted, I was challenged. Instead of going back to bed and pulling the covers over my head, I was hell bent on finding a way to explain what I was going through and how I was changing. At the same time, the further I got into it, the more I could see that venturing into this topic was taboo territory. It seemed this way because I hadn’t come across anyone of the same age in my circle that wanted to talk about it. It was some big, weird code of silence that, I guess, I was also supposed to keep.

But, I couldn’t do that. These feelings weren’t going anywhere. And like anyone else who’s intrigued by a good mystery, the more you get into it, the more you want to find out how it unfolds. The more I felt that something was off limits without any understandable reason why, the more I wanted to know about it. Maybe you’re like that too.

So 3:00am became a weird friend to me. In the quiet and stillness of the very early morning I’d investigate what I really wanted to know about this time of life and whatever I learned, I wanted to share it.

There was one thing I knew when it came to writing a book about midlife. I felt it was bigger than me. I’d tried to write books several times in my life and couldn’t get past the first few pages. I either hated what I wrote or I just didn’t think anyone would really care.

But something about getting older, and doing it well made me feel like I had to get rid of my ego so I could just pass a message to anyone I knew.

I had to write this book.

I wanted to write it for my friends, sisters and daughters. I wanted their friends and family to have it in their hands. And from there, I wanted a conversation started with our partners, our moms, our dads, our sons and our colleagues.

I had a burning desire to add my voice to the small but collective chorus of the people that I encountered during my online quests, who saw midlife as something amazing and vital. Thankfully, there’s a small army of women who believe in the power and positivity of this age. And I felt a need to be a part of this groundswell. I wanted to find a way to share my own thoughts and trash the stilted thinking of a "use by date" when it came to the potential of a person. Something in me felt like taking on the commitment of proving that our 40s, 50s and 60s (and beyond) could be a time of deep personal development and progress as long as we backed ourselves, even if we were flying blind, and kept taking steps into the big unknown.

And this part, the taking steps into the big unknown part, was actually where I was at during those middle of the night writing and researching sessions. To find answers I resonated with, to work out where to start the journey, I found I really had to search. And that was saying a lot considering my day job was often as a researcher for television shows. I prided myself in being able to find the best information and best people to tell stories in a pinch, but with this whole midlife thing, I had to really knuckle down and look damn hard for information that I could relate to and that also inspired me. While I looked, I couldn’t help but think how bizarre it all was. Here we live in a time where we’re supposed to be so evolved and where we have access to everything, yet here I was, in the middle of the night in my sweats, scouring search engines for seriously real, proof- positive messages about what to expect from our 40s and beyond. It simply didn’t make any sense to me.

If I was the only one walking around not knowing what was happening that would be one thing. But time and time again I would be confronted by women in my circle – smart, switched on, “should know everything” women – who had no idea about what they were going through and seemed quite happy to keep it that way.

Here’s a classic example from when I had started writing this book. I was telling a colleagues, in her late 40s, about what I was up to. and she told me that she wasn't’ "anywhere near menopause yet so she didn’t need to think about it for a while”.

I tried not to raise my left eyebrow.

Then she added that she really had no idea about what this stage of life even meant. It got a little awkward so I changed the subject to something nice and vanilla, but on the inside, I saw a kindred spirit.

When this woman shared what her version of menopause looked like I completely got it. That disconnect was me at 47. When someone would say the “M Word” to me, I’d draw an absolute blank. In my mind, I wasn’t there yet, even though my age pretty much said otherwise. I had no reference point of what going through menopause looked like, let alone what it felt like or how it would impact me. The only slight bit of intel I had on it was that it seemed like something I’d be smart to sidetrack as much as I possibly could.

I got exactly what this woman was saying (and what she wasn’t saying!). It was that attitude of avoiding clues or forward thinking that kept me in the dark until I couldn’t stay clueless anymore.

My personal need to check under the hood of midlife led me through an often confronting and frustrating period to gain control of my well-being. In the chapters ahead I’ll tell you the story of what happens when you’re not aware of what your body is trying to tell you, especially when you think that you "Don’t need to think about it for a while".

But before we get started, I’d like to clarify some terms.

Most of us think of menopause as when a woman’s periods stop and yes, that’s correct. To break it down though, let's do a little Menopause 101 and talk basics. (For those of you who already know this, that's awesome! But as I’ve encountered so many women who have no idea regarding how menopause works, like the women I mentioned above, these few paragraphs are for them).

The word "menopause" comes from the Greek word pausis - meaning cessation- and the root word men- which stands for month. Put them all together and, well we know what that means!

Menopause designates the official stop to the menstrual cycle and the general rule of thumb says that if you’ve gone for one year without a period, then you’re officially in menopause. You’re not making viable eggs anymore and you will not be able to naturally get pregnant.

In our Western population, the actual timing of menopause, in the average healthy woman, can happen somewhere between 48 – 53 years of age. For some women though, early menopause is a fact of life and this can occur anytime before this average range due to genetics, medical conditions, surgical procedures such as hysterectomy or medical treatments like radiation and chemotherapy. While the physical process of menopause would be obvious, there’s a deep psychological connection that has long been ignored and much of this book explores this link.

Confusion with menopause and whether we’re "at that stage yet" or not is because of a relatively new term that's been introduced in the past decade into our current culture's vocabulary of female health and that’s “perimenopause”. While the term can be traced back to a 1931 book, Obstetrics: Gynecology by Joseph Bolivar De Lee and Jacob Pearl Greenhill, it's a new bit of lingo. In fact, as I write this and then spell check, my auto-corrector recognizes "menopause" but not "perimenopause".

The lack of recognition of this word isn’t limited to my spell-checker. Many women I speak to today, whose periods are a thing of the past, have no idea what this newfangled word “perimenopause” is. They've never heard of it! When I’ve mentioned it in conversation they look at me like I'm from the wimpy, whiney, younger generation that has to make a big deal about everything they experience.

I admit that they might have point. The tail end of the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the generations that follow are known for setting the bar high when it comes to having demands and wanting choice. And now, that choice has extended to lifting the lid on a lot of the so- called “normal” ways of doing things. We're now looking closer at the stories we’ve been told. We’re asking questions and naming names. While perimenopause was always there, somehow accepting, understanding and seeing it as a tangible stage of life never quite took off for the generations that came before us. Label or no label though, when I clarify the difference between perimenopause and menopause for my older and wiser women friends, they recognize right away what I’m talking about. Some even admit having a name to put to what they went through might've been helpful. It would’ve been really frustrating to not be able to give a name to a host of stuff that was going on.

So here’s the thing:

Perimenopause is the lead up to menopause. It’s responsible for the upheaval and classic symptoms that most of us have attributed to menopause. This process, which can take years, is when our hormones start making themselves known, often manifesting by way of symptoms that accompany our periods. As progesterone, estrogen and other hormone levels begin to fluctuate, they set off a chain of events that begin stimulating several aspects of our nervous system. My belief is that this hormonal reaction stirs things up and calls our attention to nearly every key area of our life from the way we feel about our bodies to the demands on our time. It can even make us face up to our unresolved hopes and dreams or highlight the health of our closest relationships and more. It’s almost like these hormones go on a massive fishing expedition to inspect what’s going on and to search for where things aren’t up to scratch. And as often happens in life, it’s the things that aren’t working that stand out the most.

So let’s get down to the very basics. When you’re reading this book, I kind of tandem between the two words. When I say "going through menopause", that might not necessarily mean periods have ceased. I may be talking the old school label of what we now know perimenopause to be. When I say “perimenopause” I’m talking about the lead up to the time when periods officially stop which is menopause. Basically, I’m probably gonna interchange the two words just to keep a complicated scenario semi-simple.

Confused yet?

I hope not too much.

The most important thing to understand about both of these life events is that they can be considered massive wake up calls to address all aspects of your being from your health and family life to your vocation, your spirituality, your core values and beliefs. Really taking charge during perimenopause is the equivalent of developing a business plan for the rest of your life. Right now, this is a time to take a look at what you’ve got and then, work out what you’re going to need to thrive in the years ahead.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a radical time. Women who take on the challenge of this opportunity are absolutely pioneers because this is stuff no one ever told us how to do. Who knew it was even possible to look forward to the years ahead in a dynamic way?

One way to look at what we’re going through right now is to go backwards a bit. To me, going through perimenopause has big similarities to pregnancy. And this similarity is all about cultural shift.

Whether you’ve had a child or not, if you think back over the years, there was a time when pregnancy did not have the social cachet it has today. Actors couldn’t even say the word on television. A woman either got “knocked up” or had a “bun in the oven” or some long beaked bird was responsible for bringing a human baby into the world and dropping it into a lowly cabbage patch. Being pregnant was something that “happened” not something that was owned.

But somewhere along the way, and this happened recently, the way the world thought of pregnant women changed. Now, the words “mummy” and “yummy” are used in the same breath. This is a whole other story than when I had my kids! I remember when I was pregnant for the first time, over 25 years ago. It was a license to be a frump. I used to schlep around in shapeless giant t-shirts and unattractive mother-to- be overalls (I gotta say, I was comfortable!). But now, that attitude of seeing pregnancy as a nine month hall pass to let yourself go is a social no- no. Pregnancy is now touted as empowering. Sexy.

And rightly so. Times and attitudes have changed dramatically and that’s a good thing.

And so this cultural shift of perception, of something that once needed to be kept under wraps but now is out and proud, reminds me very much of where we’re at with midlife.

A lot of us connect perimenopause and menopause with everything that sucks. We've been told since we were young girls how our bodies will just plain turn on us. We’ve been brought up to believe that the path beyond 40 is a loaded minefield, a sagging booby trap full of extreme lowlights like being ravaged by hormones from hell, losing our looks, being invisible, being redundant in the workplace, never having sex and on and on and on.

With a laundry list of scary and downright unattractive expectations, it’s no wonder we don’t want to know about this thing and hope it just goes away.

To be totally honest, there’s no doubt that this stage of life presents a variety of symptoms and scenarios that are confronting. But let’s be realistic here. Don't all stages of our human life have their unique quirks? For example:

Did you teethe as a toddler or have acne as a teenager?

Did you hide or love your newly grown breasts as a pre teen?

Did you want to tear the roof off the house during periods from hell?

Did you do the “Freshman 15”? That’s the slang term for gaining weight when you first left home. Maybe you had an eating disorder as you tried to put some kind of control into your life.

And how about managing monthly periods as an adult or going through pregnancy? There’s a few quirks there to say the least…

Now, imagine that during every physically quirky life stage you found yourself in you made a choice. You decided how you approached each stage and how you took care of yourself. You chose to either learn about the processes you were going through OR you chose to soldier on without looking too close. Or, you ignored them all together and kept on moving. Which category do you slot into?

And let’s go one level deeper.

We all know that our human experience reaches far beyond flesh and bone. Beyond the physical, we’ve also gone through stages of learning how to make our way in the world. That means that we’ve developed patterns for how we make choices, a lot of times courtesy of the way we’ve been brought up. We most likely do what we learned, either consciously or unconsciously, attracting certain people and situations into our life that might’ve been perfect, completely wrong or somewhere in between.

And then there are the practicalities of being in society. All of us at midlife have spent the majority of our adult time in the “getting” years. We’ve been “getting” an education, “getting” relationships, “getting” careers, “getting” a family and “getting” stuff. We’ve spent a lot of these “getting” years doing things because we’ve always been told that’s the way it was supposed to be. Following some of these rules has worked out just fine for us and then there are the others, where the expectations don’t fit at all to what we were told they’d be. And when some of these expectations didn’t pan out, we’ve been faced with choices, fork in the road situations. Some of us have faced up to these life crossroads as they’ve presented themselves while others have turned a blind eye – and understandably so. When you have a family depending on you or you’re just trying to keep the wheels of life turning, sometimes there’s no choice but to put your own needs on the back burner and hope everything will just magically work itself out.

For the most part, this kind of “deal with it or don’t” mentality manages to do the job for years, for decades. Before our 40s rolled around, we generally had the energy to push problems under the rug. We also had time on our side. It was easy then to think that maybe, once the kids got a little older, or once our careers finally took off, etcetera, etcetera, that maybe things would settle down and turn normal.

But now, here we are at midlife and this is where it all gets really interesting.

Many of the problems that have been smoldering beneath the surface as the years ticked over, whether they’ve been physical, mental, social or a little bit of everything combined, begin to crack through the crust.

At first these issues are a gentle nag. Picture a cranky toddler pulling on your clothes for attention while you’re trying to do something else. You can ignore the pull for a bit, but then, when that toddler starts wailing and getting really noisy and all around misbehaving, you get a big hint that it’s time to take some action.

So what’s going on here?

Is it possible that the things that haven't been working in your life, that you’ve continued to put up with, might actually be profound messages that are trying to tell you something?

For instance:

Why can’t you make peace with your body and feel good, once and for all in your skin?

Why are you putting up with a relationship that has nothing to do with the dreams or standards you’ve set for yourself?

Why do you do what your family, friends or even what your job dictates you to do when it’s never, ever felt right?

Why, as much as you love your kids, do you feel frustrated being “just a mom”?

What are you doing with your life and for God’s sake, why hasn’t the thing that you had hoped for happened yet?

A lot of what we imagine about what starts a midlife crisis is wrapped up in these big questions. It’s like a foggy mirror is wiped clean and without asking for it, you’re looking straight into a sobering reflection of where your life stands. When that moment of honest awareness looks you in the face and you’re presented with a picture that the most pressing issues of your life are either not quite right (or are dreadfully wrong) it stings.

But if you think the way I do, the flipside is worse. There’s a downside to ignoring the messages that are begging for your attention. In a lot of ways, these messages are like pulling weeds. It’s something we have to do if we want to see an amazing garden but it’s gonna mean getting our hands into the dirt. Midlife is an invitation for us to have a look back at how we got here and why we think and behave the way we do. It’s an opportunity to uncover who programmed our thoughts and how much of our life, the part that’s not working was a choice we made because of what society expected of us. It can also be a time to dig deep and own up to what part we’ve played in anything that’s limiting us at this point.

And this all brings us to a crossroads. We have legitimate solid reasons, both physical and emotional to take action, but at the same time, we’re still living in a time where we don’t have a strong cultural, medical or social support system to ease and lift us up to get through it.

At midlife we need to do exactly the same thing that pregnant women of earlier generations have done. Somewhere along the recent way, pregnant women saw they thrived with a delicate balance of relaxing into the reality of their physical situation while at the same time prioritizing their self-esteem. This changed everything and morphed into a demand - a non-negotiable request for the best - to make the most of the physical awesomeness that is pregnancy. Pregnant women expect state of the art information and choice and most of all they know to unashamedly ask for support and respect.

I feel like the same type of tipping point for the needs of women over 40 is just about here. There is finally a collective whisper of voices, a slight shifting of the earth under our feet. It’s a movement of women who’ve really had enough of the stigma, the bias and the lack of knowledge and choice.

On my end, I’ve found the responsibility of adding my voice to this movement overwhelming. There have been many times as I’ve been writing that I’ve asked myself, “What’s so special about me that I’m writing a book about how to make changes during one of the most profound times in a woman’s biological life?”

“I’m not a doctor,” I’d tell myself. “There are a million medical experts in this field who can do this better.”

But here’s the truth.

At the core of it, I’m just like you. I’m a woman who’s trying to live a good life and expecting that there will be solid guidance for the tricky patches, those quirky bits I mentioned, along the way. But the fact is there are very few medical experts in the world (and I mention my favorites in this book) who have been able to make a dent in the mountains of misinformation, scare tactics and old wives tales that surround the issue of menopause.

Knowing about what happens at midlife should’ve been pretty straightforward for me. Through my job I was plugged in to research, I was proactive in my health care and had women in my circle who were the same age. But none of that mattered. Generally speaking, nothing about perimenopause came easily into my radar and the messages that were there couldn’t get through to me. I had to find my own way when it came to working out how to navigate midlife and when I look back, all that I really needed was just a friend who could tell me that everything was going to be alright, actually even better.

So, consider me that friend, a sister, a mother, part of a tribe. Consider me someone who can pass on a little homespun wisdom collected personally and learned from pioneers in the field. And from there, the responsibility is going to be yours to apply these lessons and begin your own journey. That’s why this book is called “Be Your Own Change Guru”. Don’t get worried, this isn’t about how to don a white turban and sit in a pretzel position. “Guru” is just a simple word for “teacher” in the ancient language of Sanskrit and this book is really a do it yourself guide to making change. My hope is that this book can show you how powerful your own inner teacher is and how you can rely and trust yourself to make change and in turn, teach others one day how to do the same. In many ways, this is a modern reference to how the older women in tribal cultures were treated, as keepers of the knowledge with a high priority to pass the messages of midlife to their younger tribal sisters, when they were ready.

When I was researching this book and applying my personal experiences I realized something very interesting and powerful about making simple, singular change at midlife. I noticed that as I pursued answers and solutions to the individual challenges I faced, it secretly supported – or I should say continues to support- the physical and mental changes that accompany this time. Rather than feeling like I was at the mercy of “the change” or choosing to stay in the dark about all of it, I now notice that I feel more at peace and more empowered by the surprises that come my way. I’m certain our body and soul responds when we’re doing the right thing in all areas of our life. When I know I’m in alignment with the things that are important to me, I can rest assured that I’m not tossing and turning in the middle of the night because I have things on my mind. I’m tossing and turning because my body is changing (and to deal with the tossing and turning, I get up, I create and nap later…).

So when you read this book and you have a change in mind that you want to make, realize you’re not just working on one thing. You’re actually helping yourself move through life in a graceful and elegant way that affects everything. You can only imagine what happens if you take the opposite approach and don’t work on the things that aren’t right in your life. Actually, I choose NOT to imagine that and I’m betting that because you’re reading this book, you feel exactly the same way.

One of my heroes, Dr. Christiane Northrup, who I refer to many times in this book, is an advocate of the concept of creating wellness “upstream”. Examining issues “upstream” means getting to the bottom of everything that doesn’t work for us early in the piece, upstream from our personal river, whether it’s physical, mental, social or whatever. She says that the problem with medicine as we know it, and the way that the menopausal years have been dealt with up until now is that people and doctors don’t deal with issues until they are deep into the river system and it’s possibly too late.

This is our time to clean up our personal rivers. Right at the top.

Right now, you and I have the opportunity to create systems that are clean, beautiful, flowing and ultimately endless. And it’s all because we have chosen to be brave and make the change, during a cultural tipping point. We are the first generation of women over 40 who are demanding to live our lives upstream.

Susan Paget

Sydney, Australia 2013