Perimenopausal journal Time to slow down and smell the flowers

This month has been a pretty good one after august and feeling so low. Now life has gone back to a routine with the girls back at school, its given me more time to focus on me, and I'm realising if I want to get through the menopause I need to except life can't be the same, I have to change how I approach everyday. My emotions and moods are up and down, energy levels change day by day and pushing myself to do things I normally do only makes me frustrated and feel guilty.

I'm trying hard to take a day at a time and deal with what I'm feeling when it arises, rather than pushing it to the side, as this only makes it build up and I end up with a month like I had last month.

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September is normally when I get busy at work and work none stop till January, work is restructuring and I've found myself only working a couple of days a week, you would think this would make me happy after spending the last month wanting time alone, but it hasn't.

I put not feeling happy to being frightened of having to much time alone with my thoughts. When both my girls started full time school, after years of being a stay at home mum, to suddenly having child free days for the first time in years made me have to deal with a lot of things that I hadn't had time to process, this lead to me suffering with depression. I was in a dark place for a long time and going to work really helped me to get out of my own head and the black cloud lifted. Once I started perimenopause the grey days have started to reappear and august was a very grey month. The shock of no work scared me as work is a place that I feel like me, and menopause is already making me lose myself. l also felt guilty for not working I felt jobless (which I wasn't no mum is ever jobless, and I still have two days a week.)

I decided to use this time to concentrate on changing my career, as I had already started looking in to it. This didn't work as I now felt a sense of urgency to find a new career not so much for money but just so I could stay busy and didn't start spending days in my head analysing everything that was wrong with my life and keep these dark clouds away . Depression in menopause is really common and as I've been there before I'm conscious of situations that can bring it on . I needed a purpose something to help me get out of bed in a morning as motivation is another thing we lose during this time.

I told you in my last blog post how I've started reading a lot of self help, spiritual enlightenment books which are really helping me deal with my up and down emotions, controlling my thoughts and checking in how I really feel.

A lot of the books have exercises to follow like little workshops from meditations and journaling questions, reading the books is great but I need to have a go at some of the exercises in these book. One of the questions in a journaling exercise was what happens when you change why me to what is this trying to teach me.

when I looked into what I was feeling towards my free time problem I remembered a link my friend had sent me to wellbeing with Rita Goalan {five essentials on menopause}

Rina spoke about how the menopause wasn't always seen as a bad time and in Chinese medicine it is a time when women are supposed to slow down and smell the flowers and to except this time as a quite time, time to rest. After watching it I thought that's all well and good but its just not possible to take a break and slow down when you have a job and family to take care of. This was my thought on it before I knew I was going to have all this spear time

I re watched the video and that's when I thought maybe she's right I'd been spending my time asking why have I all this free time instead of looking at it as a blessing and not a worry, maybe it had come at a great time, this was my slow down time she was talking about to help me embrace menopause instead of being so scared of what menopause was going to do to me ,use it to my advantage and change with it.

They say time is a great healer so with my new free time I'm healing myself from the inside out. I've decided to forget about looking for a new career, I have stopped looking at collage courses and I'm doing things that make me happy. I've just done a 21day yoga challenge with schuyler Grant which was so good 60 poses in 21 days and started following the exercises that are in the self help books which have made me look into following a more spiritual path.

I've also taken on a new project which is really exciting and is more in the field I want to work in,it's also something I would never have thought of taking on if I was still working so much, its exactly what I've been looking for to give myself back a passion and purpose. This time to myself has also helped with my patience with my girls when they come home from school they have my undivided attention and I now have all week to get my house clean, washing and ironing done at a leisurely pace rather than spending my weekend trying to get it all done ready for the next week.

I said in my last post you can't get of the Ferris wheel of life but you can slow it down and take in the view and smell the flowers, I really do feel I'm beginning to find a bit of zen in my house of hormones .