Alone in a Crowd: The Hidden Landscape of Menopause
Culture be damned, we need to talk
In the middle of their lives, women’s bodies change. This change is as individual as one’s laugh, as personal as one’s deepest-held secret. While the change is often extremely difficult and largely unattended by those around us, it will be change nonetheless; a hard-won evolution of sorts that affects our way of seeing and our ways of being. And if we stand on this threshold alone, in a culture without ritual — with no map and no substantial support — how do we find our way?
Women in the middle can go mad, seek and abandon love, settle scores, and find god; as if seized by reeling terrors and ecstasies, we are often voracious for nonexistent things. Culture sells us potions and surgeries; we are encouraged to sculpt perfect bodies and put our best (meaning youngest) foot forward. But we are not particularly honored or revered for the work we’ve done or the value we bring to the next generations. We are not nourished by society; we are unseen. In a culture that starves us, we wilt.
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals…During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their…
