When I hit menopause it was a shock to discover that it was something I wasn’t supposed to talk about. When I did, I was hit with walls of silence, and other people’s visible discomfort. I felt frustrated, because I wanted to talk and educate myself about something fundamental going on in my body. I wanted to move beyond simply sitting at home, googling a load of depressing symptoms. So, as an artist, I decided to create a theatre project around it. This got me out there interviewing members of the queer community about all things menopause.
There is a popular myth within the straight world - that the queer community somehow have an easier time with menopause. One lesbian I spoke to was told, “well, you have a same sex partner, so it will be easier anyway”, followed swiftly by, “but sure you haven’t given birth to children, so your menopause won’t be severe”. Her partner was in fact going through menopause at the same time, and because one size does not fit all in terms of each individual’s symptoms, it was, at times, a difficult experience for both women. “The straight community needs to understand,” she told me, “that our bodies behave the same way as theirs, whether we are queer or have given birth to children or not.”
While there are the age-old,universal symptoms of hot flushes,mood swing,brain fog,and the sense that you are no longer in charge of the ship that is your body, many symptoms can be specific to the individual themselves. These unrecognised symptoms can at times leave queer people without a proper diagnosis of menopause. The particular symptom that kept surfacing during my conversations with others was anxiety. This was for me the first indication that something was going on physiologically.
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