Alone in a Crowd: The Hidden Landscape of Menopause
Culture be damned, we need to talk
Lisa Renee

Lisa Renee

Feb 23, 2018·6 min read
Image: Getty

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 identity…and a new way, which the ritual establishes.

This liminal phase in a woman’s life is written, at least in part, by her culture. Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, a professor in obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive health at Yale Medical School and lead author of a study on the cultural impact of menopause writes, “In societies where age is more revered and the older woman is the wiser and better woman, menopausal symptoms are significantly less bothersome. Where older is not better, many women equate menopause with old age, and symptoms can be much more devastating.” The study found that participants living in the United States, UK, France, and Canada were prone to find menopause much worse than they had anticipated.

A 2002 study found that Asian women report much lower rates of menopause-related symptoms than Western women. This is possibly linked to diet (soy!), but prevailing thought suggests that it may be the result of Asian attitudes towards aging. Social status in Asian cultures often increases with age, and positive attitudes about menopause and aging are common. The “change,” therefore, may be easier to endure in the presence of support. Imagine that! The Japanese word for this phase of life, konenki, translates to “renewal years” and “energy.” How your culture sees you, treats you, and talks about you dictates how you live in that culture. Culture is our mirror, and if we see withered crones in the glass, we feel useless and disposable. If, however, we see energy and renewal — well, what does that feel like?

It’s difficult to not see oneself the way the culture sees you. I’ve fallen prey to this myself: I worry that I dress “too young” (casual or revealing) or tease myself for dressing “too old” (frumpy or staid). I’ve worried the furrows at my brow, and I’ve hated my bingo-lady knees. But what are we missing when we follow these well-worn scripts? The aging bikini-clad woman on the beach may be a world-class equestrienne, and the muumuu-wearing gray-hair in the coffee shop is, perhaps, an award-winning poet. The bingo ladies are f****** geniuses, for all we know.

Perhaps what’s needed is a tearing down of previously held gender and body assumptions; a rebuilding of the perception of the self, culture be damned. A new kindness, a sort of aha! moment regarding feminine experience. Mom napping on the couch throughout her fifties suddenly makes sense. That cranky woman in the grocery, the snappish friends, the no-shows — we’re all navigating a secret, forbidden landscape alone in a crowd, invisible in a blind culture. We’re all, secretly, sort of badass.

In the United States, we struggle to conjure meaning from this chapter in a culture that has its eyes closed and fingers in its ears. Women in their thirties, who may find their definition in children (as I did) or work (as many do), tend to look backwards for cues from their own experience and from younger peers, rather than gathering information from those women who have already traversed the high and difficult terrain of modern female adulthood. We struggle to keep up with our youth-besotted culture. As we age and things begin to unravel, as they do, our attention is snapped forward, eyes front, facing the unknown wild of the middle. We are left to find clues, maps, and guides to take our hands and show us the way. We are left, paradoxically, alone in a crowd of similarly searching sisters.

In the darkest moments of the past dark decade, I marinated in the brine of menopause forums. An alternate reality jammed with thousands (millions?) of women from all over the globe, these internet gathering places provide immeasurable comfort. No matter the alien nature of your newest symptom, there are many others with the same body oddity and much talk about how to fix it. Or survive it, at least.
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