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 coat that signals she's arrived. The watch that says she's serious. 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?
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