15 Jun
Ok so this is going to be long and I apologise in advance but I need to write it somewhere because I've been sitting with it all afternoon and I think I might actually cry a bit. Background: I'm 40. I've been lurking in this room for about two months. I kept telling myself I was too young to be here, that I was probably just tired, that everyone with two kids and a full-time job feels like this, that I was being dramatic. Classic me. My cycles have been all over the place since last spring. Like, I used to be 28 days, reliable as a train that actually runs on time (rare, I know), and then suddenly 19 days, then 34 days, then 19 again. I started tracking it properly in January because I needed to feel like I was doing something rather than just googling at 11pm and terrifying myself. I wrote everything down. Cycle length, the anxiety that arrives out of nowhere about four days before, the week where I genuinely cannot find words and my colleague had to finish my sentences twice in one meeting, the night where I woke up at 3am absolutely convinced I'd forgotten to do something catastrophic at work (I hadn't), the fatigue that isn't fixed by sleep. I had two months of notes on my phone. And I went to my GP this morning fully prepared to be told I was stressed and should try mindfulness. She didn't say that. She actually looked at my notes. She asked follow-up questions. She said the cycle changes were worth taking seriously at my age and she's referring me for bloodwork. She said we'd talk about what the results mean and what options there are. She didn't say "you're too young" once. I sat in my car afterwards and I just. Sat there. Because I've been telling myself for nearly a year that I was making it up. That this was just life. That I needed to toughen up or sleep more or eat better or whatever. And someone finally said actually, no, this is worth looking at. I don't have answers yet. The bloods might show nothing. I might still be in "just life" territory, I genuinely don't know. But I feel like I was heard for the first time in a long time and that is not nothing. If you're sitting on symptoms and talking yourself out of going: take your notes. Go anyway. You're not being dramatic. x