Female Trouble and Speculations

I ran into a friend of mine from high school and we started talking about what's been happening in our lives in the last couple of years. Like me, she's been through a lot of hell due to perimenopause. I'm starting to wonder how many women my age (40) are actually experiencing this same thing. It's more than a little frightening to think that we might start the pre-menopause hell and then not actually GO through menopause until we're in our 60s. Twenty years of this would be impossible. There is no way I could live through that. Now, the average span of perimenopause is usually two years, but that isn't set in stone. After all, the law of averages also puts most women in their late 40s to early 50s before this happens to them. It's looking that that is less and less the case now.

Then again, the average age for starting one's period used to be 12/13. I was nine. I know a lot of girls who were about nine or ten when they started. And for a while, I thought it was just because I was a heavier kid. In fact, I'd been led to believe that by medical professionals. Come to find out though, a lot of other girls started about that time as well, many of whom were at a healthy weight. Many of these women have continued to maintain that healthy weight throughout their lives and are still experiencing perimenopause symptoms in their late 30s and early 40s.

Economically, this could cause a lot of problems for a lot of women. There are very few jobs that will allow someone to take off work for 17 days because they can't stop bleeding. There are very few jobs that will allow someone to stay once they've begun to experience serious emotional breakdowns. There are very few jobs who will accept the idea that women  in their 40s are going through this because of menopause when that is a condition that people tend to expect a full decade later. Moreover, there are those who will use this hormonal upheaval as some kind of rallying point as to why women can't be trusted to perform their jobs. It's damned scary that people would do this, but it will happen. Something completely out of our control could derail our lives during a decade when many people are reaching the upper levels of their careers and gaining the most status.

Right now, the main thing that I know is that I want this hormone hell to end. I don't want to continue to spend my life in a vortex of blood and insanity. I would like to just live out my days calmly, peacefully, and clean. I don't want to have to worry about what might happen if I stay out too long or if I bend over just one too many times. I don't want to have to spend hours talking myself down from mood swings that come so abruptly and intensely that they can be nothing but false data. I just want to be normal again.