Perimenopause: The Ungovernable Force

Perimenopause is a season of profound physiological change, but it is also something far more dangerous: a political awakening.

For many women, midlife arrives like a rupture. Relationships that once felt sustainable suddenly feel intolerable. Careers built through decades of over-functioning begin to hollow us out from the inside. The coping mechanisms, perfectionism, and self-discipline, that once earned us praise stop working. Sleep disruption, hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, early waking, brain fog, and chronic fatigue slowly erode the ability to perform at the pace modern capitalism demands of us. Women who once carried entire organizations, households, and communities on their backs suddenly find themselves unable to continue functioning as machines disguised as human beings.

Women with previously undiagnosed ADHD often experience this collapse even more acutely as the scaffolding they relied upon simply gives way. Life becomes unmanageable. The high-performing identity that once felt foundational fractures into exhaustion, grief, rage, and uncertainty.

Beneath the fear is often a devastating question:

If I can no longer overperform, who am I and how can I continue to support myself?

One in ten women leaves the workforce during menopause. That statistic is both a health and economic crisis, and inexcusable in this day and age. Women lose income, retirement savings, career momentum, stability, and identity. But beneath that devastation lies another truth few people are willing to say out loud; many workplaces were never designed for human flourishing to begin with. Certainly not for women. Not for mothers. Not for caretakers. Not for disabled people. Not for neurodivergent people. Not for anyone expected to hold together both a professional identity and an entire ecosystem of invisible labor at home.

The modern workplace demands compartmentalization bordering on dissociation. It asks us to sever ourselves from our bodies in order to remain productive. It rewards self-abandonment and calls it professionalism. It praises burnout as ambition. It pathologizes emotion while exploiting empathy. It is deeply rooted in ableism, extraction, patriarchy, and white supremacist notions of productivity and worth.

Some of us could assimilate for a while. Those of us with enough privilege, enough health, enough stamina, enough adrenaline. But many of us always knew, somewhere deep in our bones, that the structure itself was hostile and unsustainable.

Perimenopause simply makes that truth impossible to ignore.

I first experienced what I called burnout in the fall of 2020. The previous 2-3 years, I had been experiencing new and irregular symptoms of being late reproductive age/perimenopausal. I had never experienced migraines before, now they were occuring most months a day or two before my period, I was waking up hot at 2-3am and many times unable to get back to sleep. I had just graduated from midwifery school while working part-time as a labor and delivery nurse and raising my son during a global pandemic. That same summer, wildfires came within miles of our home in Oregon, and for weeks we monitored evacuation notices while continuing to work, parent, and survive.

At the time, my collapse felt rational. Anyone would burn out under those conditions, I told myself. So I adapted the way women are trained to adapt: I minimized my needs, recalibrated my expectations, found a slightly less demanding job, and kept going.

But six years later, something much deeper arrived.

This burnout did not feel logistical. It felt spiritual.

It was not simply exhaustion; it was the disintegration of an identity built around survival, achievement, and self-erasure. And for the first time in my life, instead of fighting it, I surrendered to it completely.

There is a moment in metamorphosis when the caterpillar does not merely grow wings. It dissolves. Its old body breaks down inside the chrysalis into imaginal goo before something new can emerge. That is what this transition demanded of me. Ego death. Surrender. The annihilation of every role and performance that once kept me safe. I endured my share of dark days during this time. Days I looked inward and saw every coping strategy, every scarcity-driven decision, every version of myself shaped by fear, compliance, exhaustion, and the desperate need to be accepted. I grieved the years spent operating in survival mode. I grieved how much beauty, creativity, sensuality, anger, and instinct had been socialized out of me in exchange for approval. I also began to understand something essential; much of what we call “burnout” is the inevitable consequence of living too long at war with ourselves.

Perimenopause strips away our capacity to tolerate the intolerable. The people-pleasing stops working. The masking stops working. The endless emotional labor stops working. We become less willing to abandon ourselves for institutions that would replace us in a week.

And perhaps this is why the culture fears aging women so profoundly.

Because once a woman no longer organizes her life around desirability, perfection, obedience, or external validation, she becomes extraordinarily difficult to control.

There is something inherently punk about this stage of life.

Punk has never merely been an aesthetic. It is a refusal. A refusal to quietly comply with systems that dehumanize us. A refusal to perform respectability in exchange for conditional safety. A refusal to mistake endurance for liberation.

Perimenopause can become that refusal embodied.

It can become the moment we stop asking permission.

The moment we stop shrinking to preserve the comfort of others.

The moment we realize that anger is not evidence of failure, but evidence that our boundaries are alive.

Women are so often taught to fear becoming “difficult.” But difficult women are the reason anything changes. Every labor movement, liberation struggle, feminist uprising, and cultural revolution has depended upon women willing to become inconvenient to power.

Maybe this transition is not asking us to become calmer, quieter, prettier, or more accommodating.

Maybe it is asking us to become fully awake.

Maybe it is about presence instead of performance.

Maybe it is about using the wisdom earned through decades of surviving patriarchy to help build something more humane for our children coming after us.

Maybe perimenopause is about becoming more punk as fuck than ever before.

To dismantle systems that never served us.

To reject the lie that our worth is measured by productivity.

To create communities where care is valued as much as achievement.

To stop apologizing for our rage.

To stop pathologizing our intuition.

To stop abandoning ourselves in order to remain legible inside broken systems.

And maybe, when you’re alone in your car screaming along to the feminist punk songs that carried you through your teens and twenties, you finally remember: You knew this was bullshit all along.

So embrace your weird.

Become louder.

Complain publicly.

Refuse respectability politics.

Be messy. Be ungovernable. Be alive.

There are many of us now.

And together, we are building the world we should have inherited in the first place.