The Body After 37
The Body After 37
A Brief
Catherine and I were at dinner when she said the thing I haven't stopped thinking about.
She'd been describing what had become familiar territory—the sleep that kept fracturing at 3 a.m., the fatigue that didn't correlate with effort, the fog that made her feel like she was thinking through gauze. She runs investor relations for a biotech company. Two kids. Trains for half-marathons, or did until recently. The kind of woman who has always been able to rely on herself to perform.
"The worst part isn't the symptoms," she said. "It's that I feel like I'm failing. Like my body is finally telling me I can't handle my own life."
She paused. "I've built everything on being someone who can handle things."
That word—failing—is what I want to examine here. Because Catherine isn't failing. Her body is entering perimenopause, a transition that will last years and that no one adequately prepared her for. What she's experiencing is biology, not breakdown. But she's interpreting it as personal inadequacy. And she's not alone in that interpretation.
Why does the body's insistence on being heard feel like failure rather than information?
The Transition No One Explains
Perimenopause is not menopause. This distinction matters, and most women don't encounter it until they're already in the passage, searching online at 2 a.m. for explanations.
Menopause is a single point—twelve consecutive months without a period. It's the destination. Perimenopause is the passage leading to it, which can begin in the mid-thirties and last a decade. During this time, a hormonal system that has hummed in the background since puberty becomes unstable in ways that are predictable in pattern but wildly unpredictable in individual experience.
Ovaries that have responded to pituitary signals with reliable estrogen and progesterone production for twenty-plus years begin to respond erratically. Some cycles, estrogen surges higher than it has since your twenties. Other cycles, it drops sharply. Progesterone, dependent on ovulation, becomes inconsistent as ovulation itself grows irregular. A feedback loop that has been a steady conversation for decades becomes a series of interruptions and overcorrections.
Variability is the defining feature here—not low hormones, but unstable ones. Systems that relied on consistency are forced into constant recalibration.
The 3 a.m. waking is not random. It is stress chemistry surfacing too early in the circadian cycle. Mood volatility is not weakness but the thinning of buffers that once absorbed impact. Cognitive fog is not decline, but fluctuation interrupting systems that depend on steadiness.
None of this is malfunction. All of it is transition.
But here's what interests me: knowing the biology doesn't seem to change how women feel about it. Catherine had read the literature. She understood, intellectually, that her symptoms had physiological explanations. And still she felt like she was failing. The shame remained.
The Shame Beneath
A specific quality of shame accompanies this passage, and it's worth examining.
It's not the shame of illness, and not quite the shame of aging, though that's adjacent. It's something more particular: the shame of being a woman whose body has started making demands she cannot override.
This doesn't make logical sense. Bodies do what bodies do. The process is universal, involuntary, morally neutral.
And yet when your body insists on more sleep, it registers as weakness. When it refuses to recover as quickly, it reads as inadequacy. When your mind fogs or your mood destabilizes, when the energy simply isn't what it was, there's an impulse to interpret this as personal failure—as evidence that you are less than you were, something to hide and compensate for and overcome through will.
This shame isn't irrational. It's the logical conclusion of a training that began in girlhood.
We learned that override is virtue, that the good woman pushes through, that the body's signals are obstacles to be conquered rather than information to be received. We learned to treat limits as challenges to our discipline and our ability to ignore those limits as proof of our worth.
Within this framework, a body that insists on being heard is a body exposing insufficiency. The training was so thorough that most of us don't recognize it as training. It just feels like reality, like truth: if you were stronger, you could handle this. If you were better, your body wouldn't be getting in the way.
The History of Override
The women entering this passage now—women in their late thirties, their forties—learned override under specific conditions. Understanding those conditions matters, because they explain why the override runs so deep.
This is the generation that came of age after Title IX but before anyone understood what equality would actually require. They were told they could do anything, and they believed it, and then they entered workplaces and institutions that had not been designed for them and had no intention of redesigning themselves.
So they adapted. They proved they belonged by outperforming. They worked longer hours, took shorter leaves, asked for less accommodation. They learned to minimize anything that marked them as different—as female, as embodied, as subject to biological processes that the men around them did not share. Pregnancy was managed to minimize disruption. Periods were never mentioned. Fatigue was never admitted. The body was treated as a liability to be contained, and the women who contained it most successfully were the ones who advanced.
This wasn't vanity or internalized misogyny. It was strategy. In rooms where your competence was already doubted, any sign of physical limitation confirmed the doubt. The body's silence wasn't just a cultural preference. It was a competitive advantage. The woman whose body never interrupted, never demanded, never inconvenienced—she was the one who got the promotion, the seat at the table, the reputation for being someone who could handle things.
And so a generation of women built careers, families, entire lives on the assumption that they could override indefinitely. They got so good at it that they forgot it was a skill. It became identity. I am someone who handles things. I am someone whose body doesn't get in the way.
Then the body starts getting in the way, and the identity cracks.
This is why the shame cuts so deep. It's not just that the body is changing. It's that the body is exposing the terms of a deal you didn't know you'd made. You traded silence for credibility, override for opportunity. The deal worked for twenty years. Now the body is renegotiating, and you don't know who you are if you're not the woman who can push through anything.
The Economy of Override
Consider how you've been living. Not with judgment—just with clarity.
There is always more to do than time or energy to do it, a gap between demand and capacity that never closes. You bridge that gap by borrowing from the body—sleeping less, recovering less, pushing past the signals that say slow down, stop, rest.
For most of your adult life, this has worked. Your body absorbed the borrowing. You ran a deficit, but consequences were delayed, diffuse, easy to attribute to something else. Override started to feel like simply how you operated, like the body would continue to absorb whatever you demanded.
This was never true.
Youth is credit. Hundreds of thousands of ovarian follicles, responsive feedback loops, metabolic resilience, the capacity to compensate for suboptimal conditions—that's the buffer, and that's what made override feel sustainable. It wasn't sustainable. It was subsidized.
Perimenopause is, among other things, the end of the subsidy.
As the buffer thins, the margin for error narrows. Compensatory capacity diminishes. Override stops working—not because you're weaker, but because the cost is no longer deferred.
Sleep you short tonight shows up tomorrow as fog you can't think through. Stress you carry this week surfaces as the 3 a.m. waking, the frayed patience, the immune system that can't shake the cold. Recovery you skip compounds until your body forces a rest you wouldn't choose.
What was never sustainable is finally being refused.
But here is the trick: the arrival of the bill feels like failure. We have so internalized the override economy that any interruption reads as personal inadequacy. When our bodies insist on their limits, we don't think "the way I was living wasn't sustainable." We think "I can no longer keep up."
We locate the problem in ourselves rather than in the conditions we were trained to accept as normal.
Broken vs. Honest
Catherine's question—whether her body is broken or finally telling the truth—is the crux.
If broken, the project is repair. Fix the malfunction, return to baseline, continue as before.
If honest, the project is entirely different. Your body is communicating what it actually requires for sustainable function. It was always communicating this, but quietly, in signals you could afford to ignore. Now it's communicating loudly, because loud is the only volume that gets through.
In this frame, symptoms are not problems to be eliminated but information to be received. Fatigue is true: you are tired, actually tired. The need for sleep is true: you need it, actually, not as luxury but as infrastructure. Intolerance for stress is true: the system is holding too much.
Nothing is breaking down. Your body is simply done absorbing the cost in silence.
This changes the question entirely. Not "how do I fix my body so I can continue as I was?" but "what would it mean to live in a way that doesn't require my body to scream to be heard?"
The Cost of Silence
There is a particular cruelty in the timing of this transition.
It arrives precisely when many women have finally accumulated enough power to use it. After decades of proving themselves, of earning credibility, of building the careers and reputations and influence they were told they could have—this is when the body demands renegotiation. Not at twenty-five, when the stakes were lower. Not at thirty, when there was still time to adjust. Now, when you're leading teams, running companies, making decisions that matter, holding positions you worked half your life to reach.
The fog happens in the meeting. The fatigue hits before the board presentation. The mood instability arrives when you need to be steady, authoritative, unflappable. You are expected to perform at your highest level while your internal infrastructure is being remodeled without your consent.
And you cannot explain this to anyone.
Not because you're ashamed—though you might be—but because there is no framework for it. The professional world has no language for "I am undergoing a significant biological transition that is affecting my cognition and energy, but I am still competent and should still be trusted with authority." There is no accommodation, no adjusted expectation, no cultural understanding. There is only performance, and the terror that any crack in that performance will confirm what some people have always suspected: that you don't really belong here, that your competence was provisional, that your body would eventually betray you.
So you navigate invisibly. You schedule important meetings for the hours when your energy is highest. You write notes to yourself because your working memory isn't reliable. You cancel social plans because you're hoarding capacity for work. You develop workarounds for the fog, strategies for the fatigue, techniques for masking the volatility. You do all of this while presenting an uninterrupted surface of capability.
This is exhausting. Not just physically—though it is that—but existentially. You are maintaining a performance while undermining the foundation that made the performance possible. You are spending energy to hide the fact that you have less energy. You are keeping a secret that half the population will eventually share, and the keeping of that secret costs you more than the transition itself.
The women I know in this passage describe a particular loneliness. Not the loneliness of having no one to talk to, but the loneliness of talking to no one about this. The loneliness of smiling in the meeting and wondering if anyone else is as tired as you are. The loneliness of watching younger women with their reliable bodies and remembering when yours was like that. The loneliness of suspecting you are struggling more than everyone else, because no one else is talking about it either.
What would change if we talked about it? If the silence broke? If we admitted that this transition is real, is significant, is affecting the very women we rely on to lead and decide and build? Not to ask for pity or accommodation, but simply to tell the truth: this is happening, it is hard, and pretending otherwise costs more than honesty ever would.
The Difficulty of Listening
Most women do not lack the ability to listen to their bodies. They lack the conditions under which listening ever mattered.
Override trained signal out of relevance. Fatigue became noise. Tension became background. Hunger, depletion, emotional narrowing—all learned to wait.
This passage reverses that hierarchy. Signals that were once ignorable become consequential. Patterns that were invisible under constant override surface because the system no longer compensates for them.
Afternoon fatigue follows nights of insufficient sleep, or mornings of skipped meals, or weeks of unrelenting stress. A mood dip before a period is not a character flaw but a predictable response to a predictable hormonal shift. Neck tension is not random—it is where decades of unprocessed stress have been stored.
The body has been speaking in complete sentences all along. Override made it possible not to hear them.
What feels like the body "getting in the way" is the body restoring signal-to-noise. Listening is not a new skill being learned. It is an old one becoming unavoidable.
What Becomes Possible
There is a way of being in a body that is not combat.
It's not management or optimization or discipline. It's not the body as obstacle, not the body as the thing that keeps failing to meet your demands. It's a way of being where bodily signals are information, where fatigue means rest rather than failure, where limits are boundaries to be respected rather than weaknesses to be overcome, where there is no negotiation because there is no separation requiring it.
This is not soft. It is practical. A woman who lives this way is not less effective—she is more effective, because she is not wasting energy on combat. She is not performing sustainability while running on fumes, not cycling between override and collapse.
What I've witnessed in women who have made this shift is specific: they stopped being afraid of their own needs. The fear had been so constant, so ambient, that they didn't know it was there until it lifted. They had been afraid that rest would make them lazy, that slowing down would mean falling behind, that if they stopped pushing, everything they'd built would collapse. They lived inside that fear so long it felt like personality. It wasn't personality. It was exhaustion, and the hypervigilance exhaustion produces.
When the fear lifted, what remained was simpler. One woman told me she makes decisions differently now—not by calculating what she can get away with, but by asking what she actually has capacity for. That distinction sounds small, but it isn't. The first question assumes her body is an obstacle to work around. The second assumes it's telling the truth.
Another described the change as spatial. She used to feel like she was living slightly outside her body, managing it from above, sending instructions down. Now she lives inside it—present in her arms, her legs, her breath. She notices hunger before she's ravenous, tiredness before she's depleted, something wrong before it becomes crisis. She has more information available because she's finally positioned to receive it.
What surprised her most was how much room there was. When she stopped spending energy on override—pushing through, performing fine, managing from a distance—more of her became available. More attention, more presence, more of whatever makes you feel like yourself. Override had been expensive. She didn't know how expensive until she stopped paying.
The Passage
Hormonal instability does not last forever.
Your system is moving from one stable state to another. Variability will settle. A new equilibrium will emerge—different from before but steady in its way. The urgent communication will quiet, not because your body stops speaking but because there is less to shout about.
Women who have crossed describe something unexpected: relief. Not just that symptoms have passed, but that something has clarified. Monthly fluctuation is gone, and the reactive quality of the perimenopausal years settles into something calmer. A consistency emerges that wasn't possible when hormones were swinging.
But listening doesn't stop. The relationship built during this passage—where your body has standing, where signals are received as intelligence, where partnership replaces combat—continues and becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
Your body after 37 is not diminished. It is no longer willing to subsidize what was never sustainable.
For decades, silence made override possible. The silence is gone.
This is not failure. It is the end of a strategy that worked under specific conditions—and no longer does.
The body will keep speaking. The only remaining question is whether it is misread as inadequacy—or recognized as the first honest accounting you've had in years.
Modern Monclaire
