An encore post

I have hunted lions. I have watched the sun rise on days when I was certain the world was ending and drunk enough whiskey to be sure of it. I have fought against the marlin, an enormous wet metaphor for my masculinity.

All of it was nothing compared to perimenopause.

I am a man, a matter of some regret in this context. I have observed and made notes. They are incomplete, as all honest accounts are.

It is unknowable, this Red Ledger of Womanhood, but I will explain it anyway.

Perimenopause, a word with too many vowels, is from the Latin for “the threshold between fertility and glorious cronehood.” It is a time when ovaries, like exhausted grenadiers, abandon their post and estrogen evaporates. Much like absinthe, for which it is also time.

Don’t bother deciphering if it’s happening or not happening. Most things halfway happen. You will know when you find yourself crying inexplicably in the grocery store as “Landslide” plays.

Having set down my credentials plainly, it remains only to tell you how it is in the borderlands between the era of spring-loaded hormones and the years that follow, which are less buoyant by degrees.

These are the things that must be endured:

• Insomnia: The nights are the first to betray you. You will lie awake counting your regrets and your nemeses as a fisherman counts his catch, except you will throw nothing back. In the mornings you will feel like you’ve been hollowed out with a grapefruit spoon.
  
• Bleeding: It will happen without pattern or mercy. It will lull you into complacency, then strike with malice. Like when you’re on your boss’s white office sofa. Do not speak of it to your boss. They can only pretend not to notice, and the awkwardness is yours alone. Soon enough, you will get to not miss this.
  
• Hot flashes: A traitorous inner furnace ignites when you least expect it, which is to say, always. You will feel a powerful urge to strip naked in public and become visibly furious at the air. There is no dignified way to do this.
  
• Moods: They will rise and fall like monsoon squalls. You will slam doors, then return and apologize. You will disassociate as the dermatologist removes questionable moles. You will bellow at the toaster if its settings are untrue. Know you are not hurtling toward operatic collapse. Probably.
  
• Carousel of Other Indignities: Everything negative and mysterious you experience from now on is perimenopause. Physical discomfort. Metabolic chaos. That asshole who cut you off in traffic. Thinning hair. Itchy earlobes. People telling you to “let that sink in.” The betrayal of your bladder when you sneeze. Chi-Chi’s vague promise to reopen. Anything that causes the urge to hurl a shoe at someone indiscreetly.

You will seek a system to manage it all. It will fail because everything happens anyway. You will be tempted to try yoga, catalogue your ordeals in a leather-bound journal, or fill your online shopping cart with items terrible and proud.

Do none of this. If you must, cry behind a rack of discounted shapewear at T.J. Maxx. They’ve seen it all at T.J. Maxx. Just do not purchase the waist cincher. You will despise it.

Steel your resolve and proceed.

I hope to leave you with something other than recommendations to age gracefully. Perhaps punch a sandbag and, as you enter this season of dissolving composure, remember: it will pass.

When? A few months. A decade. Maybe longer than Friends, certainly not longer than Grey’s Anatomy. Don’t try to track it. Uncertainty is part of the process.

I warn you so you won’t be startled when chin hairs sprout like a godforsaken harvest. Fortunately, the forgetting will also begin, and you’ll be left holding tweezers. You will tweeze nothing. You will remember again when you touch your chin and wonder when you became late 1970s Barry Gibb. Those colorless bastards will be nearly impossible to remove. Your eyesight will also have gone to shit.

The point is, this is not the end of all things. Soon enough you will be alone with your pulse and the knowledge that no part of you was ever permanent except that tattoo you got one ill-fated evening with a guy known only as “Little Bowser.”

Perimenopause is natural. Also intolerable. This is the paradox you will ponder as you cry under the Zombie Wasteland Sewer Tunnel at any given Spirit Halloween.

That is the sum of it.

Now go and swoop through the world like a hormonally-imbalanced falcon, taking sweaty dominion over it all.

Or go punch a sandbag.