They warn you about the hot flashes. The night sweats. The mood changes. They talk about whether your period is coming, whether it is late, whether this is finally menopause and what you should take for it.
There is always a checklist. There is always a supplement. There is always someone ready to tell you what is happening to your body.
Nobody warns you about the vanity.
I honestly do not even remember when my period stopped. There was no dramatic final month. It just did not come, and then it did not come again.
At first, I was happy. I mean genuinely happy. This annoying nuisance that had shown up every month, around the same time, for most of my life was finally gone. No more buying tampons. No more preparing for it. No more being inconvenienced by it.
Good. I was done with that.
But then the thing I was so happy to lose started to feel like a loss.
I did not understand that my menstrual cycle had been quietly telling me something about myself every month. It made me feel young. It made me feel like I was still fully a woman—not because having a period is what makes any of us women, because it is not. But somehow I did not understand how much I had connected the two until it was gone.
When it stopped, I felt like part of my youth had been stripped away. I felt less like a woman. That is embarrassing to admit, but it is the truth.
No one prepared me for that part.
Sometimes another woman will ask me if I have a tampon or a pad. She may be a friend, a coworker or someone digging frantically through her purse.
And I always say, “No, I do not have one.”
I never say, “I do not get my period anymore.”
I say it as if I simply forgot to bring one. As if I ran out. As if I could still need one next month.
Because saying the whole truth feels like it places me in another category. It says I am past that part of womanhood. Finished. Done.
And “done” is a terrifying word.
Lately, I have been thinking about why that word frightens me so much. My body finished a chapter without asking me if I was emotionally prepared for what it would mean. At nearly the same time, my son entered college. He still needs me, and I am still his mother, but motherhood is changing. The daily purpose that shaped almost every decision I made for years is not going to look the same forever.
Then there are the businesses, the articles and all the things I create. I have noticed that I have trouble finishing them. I keep working on them. I redesign them. I add another part. I find another possibility.
I used to think that was simply because I was creative and could see the entire vision.
Now I have to ask myself a harder question: do I keep things unfinished because finishing them makes me afraid that I will no longer have a purpose?
If the project is still in progress, then I am still creating. I am still becoming. I still have somewhere to go.
But if I finish it, what happens to me next?
That fear connects more of my life than I realized. My period stopping. My son growing up. My projects remaining unfinished. They all bring me back to the same uncomfortable question:
What is my purpose when the roles that once defined me begin to change?
And then there is the beauty industry.
I work in beauty. I sell beauty. I am expected to look good while selling products intended to help other women look good. I love this industry, and I genuinely love products. But keeping up with beauty as you get older is work.
People say, “It is only four or five steps,” as if the steps are the exhausting part.
They are not.
It is the mental weight behind them. It is noticing something different every time you look in the mirror. It is wondering whether your makeup still sits the same way. It is trying to figure out what changed, what still works and what you now have to do differently. It is the constant awareness that you are aging while working in an industry built around helping people look as though they are not.
That is the part people do not talk about.
It is more work than I have ever had to do, and most of that work happens mentally, where nobody else can see it.
Believe me, I have tried to fix the feeling with products. There is no cream for this. There is no serum, acid, peptide or complicated routine that can reach the actual problem.
I still love the products. They are part of my work and part of who I am. But I am no longer pretending they can fix something they were never designed to fix.
The lines on my face are not the whole problem.
The problem is what I sometimes believe those lines are saying about my youth, my womanhood, my relevance and my purpose.
I wish I had a beautiful conclusion for this. I wish I could tell you I have completely accepted everything and that this is automatically the most radiant, empowering chapter of my life.
I cannot tell you that because I do not know yet.
What I can tell you is that getting older can be exhausting. It can make you question parts of yourself you did not even know were vulnerable. And it can feel incredibly lonely because everyone talks about what menopause does to your body, but very few people talk about what it can do to the way you see yourself.
So if you have ever said, “No, I do not have one,” instead of admitting that you no longer need one, I understand.
I am not selling you anything.
I just do not want you to think you are the only one.
