HRT - on taking it & being cross about it

Field Note No. 12 | why i'm ready to climb up on my goddam throne

Hi friends,
I’m writing today about my (very reluctant) decision to go on HRT.
This post has been sitting in my drafts for a long time, but each time I returned to it, ideas exploded and I felt unsure when it all ended…

So ! to help me hit publish, I’ve decided to think of this as a ‘Gateway Post’ (which as a paid sub you can also listen to as an audio - which does have some f’ing and blinding in it, so maybe not one for little ears!)– one I hope will lead to more conversations, about :

anger, desire, identity, unravelling, stepping into our true selves, holding, mid-life changes, caregiving, female friendship, our bodies …

Speaking of which - if you’d like to take part in a juicy conversation around all of the above and more, inspired by our reading of Miranda July’s brilliant, bawdy and deeply human All Fours which explores one woman’s mid-life journey, you can join myself,

Lindsay Johnstone

,

Caro Giles

and

Chloe George

next Friday Oct 18th at 19:30 GMT +1 (work out your time here) for a live zoom deep-dive conversation.

More on this soon, but do SAVE THE DATE!

But for now, let’s get back to that HRT…

I started taking HRT¹ about two months ago.
I was quite cross about starting to take it.
I felt a little ashamed about it.
A little bit like I’d failed.

I’m also feeling remarkably, annoyingly, pretty great on it. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t piss me off quite a bit.

I decided to start taking HRT in mid-July this year. I was at a point of crises in how I was feeling physically and emotionally. I was so. motherfucking. tired. My body ached, right down to my bones. Everything felt very, very hard. And I was incredibly irritable. Nails down a blackboard irritable. Don’t-touch-me-even-if-

for-a-hug-and-you-are-my-gorgeous-6-year-old-son level of irritable. Irritable, in fact, feels like a mild term for it. I was actually really very angry. Everything was too much. I felt I had no space. No time to think. No one would leave me alone. The image I have in my head is of a wild animal, cornered, injured and deranged with the need to protect herself and keep her young from harm. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t good for my relationship. It wasn’t good for my kids. It certainly wasn’t much good for me.

I had known for some time that my hormones were playing a role in how I was feeling. Even with no womb and therefore no bleeds (I write about my hysterectomy here), there was a cyclical rhythm to how I felt (I still have one ovary). I’d felt exhaustion, aching, irritability for a number of years, but it was so muddled in with the chronic pain I’d been suffering from, that it was impossible to unpick one from the other. But since the hysterectomy, things had become a little clearer, the pain far less, and I’d done A LOT to try and balance my system. Acupuncture, herbs, nutrition consultations, exercise, reducing work load and stress and alcohol, sea swimming, saunas. All of it was beneficial to my overall health, but none of it made a dent in my symptoms, really. I had run out of energy (& money) to try much more.

But the idea of taking HRT didn’t sit well with me. The message I felt I was receiving, when I looked under the hood a little bit, was that women’s bodies, once again, were fundamentally flawed. That, once we hit our mid-forties, our bodies were not fit for purpose, with everything shuddering to a creaky, grumpy, sweaty halt.

It is worth pointing out that there are benefits for our aging bodies in taking these hormones – aside from often reducing (peri)menopausal symptoms there is strong evidence they can prevent osteoporosis and help maintain muscle strength. And many, many women swear by the benefits of HRT for their physical, mental and emotional sanity. And god knows we need all the support we can get.

But my question is this – and it is one I do not see being asked by any of the ‘menopause hubs’ and GPs prescribing HRT (and certainly weren’t asked me during my €200 30 minute zoom call with a GP) – WHY are we finding peri & menopause so hard? Why are our bodies grinding to a sweaty, creaky, fucking furious halt? As Susan Willson M . D. in her (well worth reading) book Making Sense of Menopause asks:

Why would Nature create our bodies to suddenly unravel and leave us feeling lost and diminished, just when we are in the prime of our lives?

I see in the lack of debate around this, echoes of similar silences around women in childbirth – why are we finding it so much harder to birth naturally, why are c-section rates sky-rocketing world-wide? - and around period and gynae issues like endometriosis, infertility, fibroids, dysmenorrhea and amenorrhea? Is it that our bodies are so ‘complicated’ and flawed that so much can go wrong? Or is it that we are all individually messing up and dropping the ball and are not sleeping enough, eating too much sugar, exercising too much, or not enough, not drinking enough water, or too much coffee and on and on and on …?  

Or could it be that we are living in a society that is in no way supportive of what we as women (and humans) need to survive and thrive?  Could it be that we, with our anger and creaky, crazy symptoms are the canaries in the coal mine?

off a cliff : women’s hormones in menopause - why? Photo by Jonas Wurster on Unsplash

I remember about a year or so ago listening to popular Irish author Cecelia Ahern being interviewed on morning radio. The interviewer asked her about her journey with HRT and she said that yes, she was taking it, mostly to help cool the anger she was feeling – and that it had helped greatly. But, she wondered aloud, with a slight edge to her usually sparkly voice, whether we were all being prescribed these hormones so that the world didn’t have to deal with a whole gaggle of rightfully angry women.

That really landed with me. Because I do think there is a fair bit that we deservedly should and need to be angry about. The second shift, mental load, removal of reproductive rights, domestic violence, historical abuse, current abuse, being a good girl, being a successful woman, being an Insta-ready mum, sexualisation in the media, imbalance in caregiving responsibilities and on and on. Isn’t it, I wondered, very convenient that HRT quells this anger so many of us feel?

In his book The Myth of Normal Dr. Gabor Matè shows with compelling evidence how the suppression of big emotions like anger, combined with high levels of stress, are leading to a very high percentage of the illnesses endemic in modern day life, many of which impact a disproportionate number of women. Matè describes women as ‘society’s shock absorbers’. And what we are absorbing, it seems, has reached a tipping point and is making many of us sick with a rapid increase in autoimmune diseases, as well as struggling more and more with life’s gateway moments like childbirth and menopause.

I can’t help but think of the oestrogen I am slapping on my thigh every morning as part of this suppression – it is a hormone designed to enable us and motivate us to be willing caregivers to our offspring and young. Is it not quite telling that the solution being offered to us as peri and menopausal women already straining under the weight of a disproportionate amount of care-giving responsibilities, which the economy hugely benefits from, is a hormone that encourages and drives us to continue to put others before ourselves?

Now I do have to write (because I can hear you yelling from the wings!) that I know HRT is not drugging us and turning us in to robot trad housewives². I’m taking HRT, I’m writing this, I still have independent, feminist thoughts, I haven’t become someone else overnight. And I do believe it has helped me feel more energised and to behave in a less volatile way and for that I (and my family!) are very grateful.

But.

And here for me is the big but.

HRT is a support, but it is not the solution. And there is little to no conversation going on, in the medical sphere at least, around why we are struggling, and struggling younger and younger, with symptoms³.

So why are we finding this transition into mid-life so hard ? Why do we suddenly get so angry? There is no one simple answer, but one point that Susan Willson makes when it comes to anger, for example, is worth pausing to consider :

The issues that cause this anger may have been present for decades, but the drop in estradiol (which encourages us to smooth everything over for the sake of nurturing) and the rise in testosterone (which is associated with more anger and aggression) often lifts the lid off of suppressed issues and memories and brings them to the fore.

Which, if you look at the extensive evidence that Dr Gabor Matè provides of the detrimental impact that the suppression of emotions like anger have on our health, starts to make a lot more sense.

It starts to look like nature, and women’s bodies, are actually remarkably smart machines, it starts to look like our symptoms and our anger might be there for a very good reason. In Chinese Medicine there are particular gateways that women are seen to go through during their lives. Healing portals during which everything becomes much more raw, loose and vulnerable, but during which, when properly embraced, provide a healing window for all that has gone on before in a person’s life. First period, child birth, menopause are three such portals. And science is beginning to back up these claims. The greatest time of neuroplasticity in a woman’s brain, for example, outside of when she is herself a foetus in the womb, is during pregnancy and the early months post partum. Our brains, if supported well, are able to form new pathways with far greater ease during this window of time.

So what if our anger is actually a helpful expression of what we have been suppressing for many years. It mightn’t be manifesting itself in particularly helpful ways (c.f. me losing my shit at the kids for not putting away their shoes) but maybe it IS there for a reason, and a valid one at that.

Maybe, instead of suppressing our symptoms, we need to be supported to examine these old patterns and traumas that are now having the lid lifted on them.

Maybe we need to be encouraged to start taking a look at what is no longer serving us, what roles we’ve been performing and no longer want to.

Maybe this is a chance to examine who we want to be for this next chapter of our lives.

Maybe it is ok if we are starting to slow down.

I’ve had multiple conversations with girl friends in recent months and all of us have said much the same things.

I am ready to let go of so much.

I’m ready to give time to myself, and to the things I know are what I’m here to do.

Fuck the rest.

Essentially what these women are saying is that they are ready to stop putting so much energy into external care, external success and are ready to start distilling themselves into who they are to be for this next chapter of their lives.

And this takes me back to what my problem with HRT is. It is, really, less to do with the hormones themselves, and more to do with the conversation around why they are being prescribed. As I said above - support not solution. Our bodies are telling us things, and we aren’t being encouraged to listen to them. We are being told we can keep going! Keep caring and working and juggling! This cream/gel/patch will help you feel better while you do all of that!

What if, though, we would all actually like to just stop? Give up. Even for just a little while? Step off the treadmill, and spend some time sitting still, facing our demons, diving deep, so that we can, when ready, emerge and climb up on our goddam thrones.

excerpt from great article by @preethinair on @sambaker ‘s The Shift.

There is a large part of me that feels that this is what a patriarchal society fears the most. Imagine it – hoards of deeply aligned older women, who no longer agree to do capitalisms donkey work, who no longer give so many fucks, speaking truth to power like the matriarchal elders we are meant to be. That’s quite a threatening prospect to a system and a structure that relies heavily on us to keep the rusty cogs of capitalism turning.

And yet, here I am taking the HRT.

On it, I am better able to cope with the stresses and juggles life throws at me. I am not sure how I would have been able to manage the grief I wrote about here with half the level of resilience I managed to muster. There’s less OTT yelling about lunchboxes and shoes (although it’s not entirely disappeared!). I’d love to do without it, maybe in time, I will. But I’ve also learnt enough to be a little kinder on myself, not so judgemental. I’m living on this bat-shit crazy planet too, I deserve all the support I can get as much as the next person.

I do think I’m better able for everything with the HRT support. But one thing I am certain about, is that it is having conversations like these, it is being willing, open and able to lift the hood on my anger, look at the patterns and traumas I’ve carried this far, and most importantly, being ok with just simply giving up for a little while, that will ultimately be the route to clambering up on that glittering throne.

I really would love to keep this conversation going. Do save the date of October 18th at 19:30 GMT +1 for the live zoom I mention above, and please let me know what you think in the comments !

1. For those of you who would like to know, I’m taking 2.5mg of estradiol once a day as a gel, which I rub on my inner arm or thigh and then leave to dry in for 5 minutes as I run around in my bra and knickers making the bed and pestering my children to get dressed. That’s it. As medications go, it is pretty uneventful. I don’t need to take progesterone, because I no longer have a womb, and therefore I don’t need to facilitate a monthly bleed.

2. Take a read of Clover Stroud’s brilliant article for more on trad wives!

3. There ARE amazing women having brilliant conversations and writing brilliant books about their experiences - follow

sam baker

here on Substack, read Miranda July’s All Fours, or check out

Lindsay Johnstone

’s recent post on losing her orgasm to name but three.