51 and genuinely cannot tell if this is burnout or perimenopause or just... being me now. The brain fog is the bit that scares me most. I used to be sharp. I was the person in the room who remembered everything, followed every thread in a meeting, came out with the exact word. Now I'm standing in front of my team going "the, um, the thing, the document with the... figures" and my junior colleague is filling it in for me with this very kind face that makes it worse somehow. I've started writing things down in a notebook obsessively. Not because I'm organised, because I'm terrified. Every word I blanked on, every moment I had to ask someone to repeat something simple. I'm building up a little log of it because I've got a GP appointment next month and I want to be able to say "here are actual examples" rather than just "I feel foggy" which sounds like nothing. This week I've been trying something with lunch. More protein, less of the sad desk sandwich I'd been eating. I don't know if it's doing anything yet but the 3pm crash has been slightly less catastrophic the last couple of days. Slightly. I'm not making any claims. Just noticing. Is it peri? Is it five years of stress? Both? I genuinely don't know and that uncertainty is its own kind of exhausting. x