I had a word for the anxiety before I had a word for perimenopause. That made it easy to put everything in the wrong drawer.

Of 32 women in this cohort, 63% mentioned mood. This figure comes from approved logs in the current Narrated corpus, including seed corpus entries during launch density.

The anxiety was real, but it was not alone. My sleep had changed. My periods had changed. I was waking hot and then spending the day feeling like my nerves were too close to the surface.

* * *

The turning point was reading women who sounded like me. Not identical, but close enough that I stopped treating each symptom as a separate personal failure. I started tracking them together, and that made the doctor conversation much easier to begin.