Being emotional

(and controlling your thoughts)

Let’s talk about menopause—a fact of life that we don’t often talk about.
When I grew up, menopause definitely was not part of the conversation.
All I kind of knew about menopause was this:

… your period will stop (sounds good!)

… there are hot flashes (sounds somewhat bad!)

... it can be an emotional roller coaster (sounds a bit mysterious!)

And that about sums up my knowledge of menopause... until... I hit perimenopause—something I didn’t even know existed.

But why didn’t I know about it?

Because menopause (and all its symptoms) was a taboo topic.
And it still is.

But that’s not very helpful!

So let’s talk about it.

I want to talk about what I learned over the last several years (yes… perimenopause can last a very long time!) and what helped me cope with the emotional roller coaster that it really is.

Strangely enough, my professional life as a linguist has led me to study emotions and their relation to language. (It turns out that understanding emotions is quite helpful in dealing with them.)

One thing I became aware of is that it was the ancient Greek philosophers who defined how we view emotions—at least in western culture. They were really down on the emotions (except love—maybe). But they were really big on rational thought. Because, in their view, emotions get in the way of rational thought. They thought that emotions should be controlled
so that they cannot cloud our thoughts.

So now we have this view that these ancient Greek philosophers (all male, of course) have designed for us. (You can see that it’s not going to be very sympathetic to emotional rollercoasters or to people experiencing them.)

This view works on the assumption that we could have pure thought if only emotions didn’t get in the way.

So, for example, we could have an experience and a clear rational thought about it. But, (Oh no!), the experience also triggers an emotion, and this emotion interferes with our rational thought.

Bad experiences (like gender inequality) make us angry (well some of us). So they make for thoughts clouded with anger!

And good experiences (like smashing the patriarchy) make us happy (hypothetically speaking). So they make for thoughts clouded with delirious joy!

But there is something missing in this picture: the role of our physical reaction. The stuff that’s going on in our bodies, like the elevated heart rate that a bad experience can trigger. In combination with the thoughts this experience evokes, it will trigger an emotion.

So you see, an emotion comes about via a combination of things: i) an experience; ii) the physical sensation it triggers; iii) and some thoughts we come up with to make sense of the whole thing.

Ok, so what happens in menopause?

Well, we have a lot of hormonal changes. And these hormonal changes can cause physical reactions, and via business as usual, these physical reactions trigger emotions!

Now the thing is that there is no experience in the real world that causes this physical reaction. It’s all inside of us!

IT’S THE HORMONES!!!

But what it looks like from the outside is this:

Emotions brought on by nothing!

And this can feel like a dark cloud of sadness

Or raging anger

So when this happens, we can react in one of two ways:

We can think we are crazy (or let others tell us that we are)

Or we can blame some random thing—an experience that would otherwise not trigger us at all. In which case we are considered irrational AND difficult.

So please…
… talk about menopause and peri-menopause! (It must not be a taboo!)

… be sad if you need to and cry!

…get angry if you need to and explode!

Because it turns out that sometimes it’s the thoughts that need to be controlled.