A Threshold Being

I was left in the doorway between who I had been and who I was becoming.

Within the past couple of years, my body has stepped across the threshold into that rite of passage territory known as perimenopause. This is the season of life when a body with a uterus shifts out of its cyclical patterns mimicking those of the moon. When I first noticed my low energy, moodiness, and headaches, I chalked it up to doing, as always, the most — just the absolute most at all times. But then the quintessential hot flashes hit and I knew — I was becoming.

The first flash was unforgettable. I was seated at my kitchen table with my son. The inside of my body grew so hot, so fast, I wondered if I’d been hit with sudden and violent food poisoning. I took my son’s plate away with alarm and, fork midway to his mouth said, “don’t eat that!”

I looked down at my food as sweat trickled down the small of my back. I jumped up to open windows and tear off layers of clothing and deduced that, after only a few bites, it’s not likely the meal. Also, no nausea hit, only the steady increase of temperature of my body as though someone reached in and maxed out the dial on the thermostat. As though my body had become a furnace. As though my presence in the room could easily stand in for a space heater.

Finally I knew that this was, in fact, a hot flash, It all clicked: I had perimenopause. And of course, it’s not an illness or disease, but mainstream misogyny certainly sees it that way, and so we are all programmed to see it that way. To resist it. To detest it.

The fact that I was still getting my period every 26 days like a clock at the time really confused me. Weren’t these symptoms reserved for when that cycle begins to falter? I did some research and found the truth: it’s different for everyone. I picked up the book by Heather Corinna that made me laugh out loud to see, an image of flames on the cover with the title: WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You.

I found so much comfort in her pages. Her inclusion of the queer and not-so-feminine person hitting this stage of life and our particular struggles warmed my heart. Because here’s the thing: no one told me this part of life could feel like a psychedelic initiation. No one said that as the body sheds its fertile rhythm, the self might also begin to shed its inherited forms. The version of woman I had been trained to be — accommodating, fertile, useful — began to molt. I was left in the doorway between who I had been and who I was becoming.

Heather Corinna’s humor and frankness gave me permission to treat this time not as an affliction, but as a queer rite of passage. Not just the end of something, but a queer becoming — the way only queerness knows how to make the end of one story the beginning of another.

Because what is queerness if not a continuous metamorphosis; a refusal to settle into the shape that culture demands of us? And what is menopause if not the body’s own declaration: I will not perform in this old way anymore.

For so long, femininity was tethered to reproduction — the sacred cow of patriarchal imagination. The womb as productivity machine. But what happens when that machine winds down, powers off, begins to emit strange noises and wild bursts of heat? What happens is that we meet our own power stripped of its utility.

We meet ourselves as beings whose worth is no longer measurable by what we can give, make, or produce. This is the paradox — the liberation embedded within the loss. The death of fertility brings with it the birth of something untamed, something that doesn’t need to be sweet.

There’s a cultural silence around menopause that feels eerily similar to the one around queerness. Both are marked by invisibility — things that are supposed to happen quietly, behind closed doors. In both cases, we are taught to self-regulate our bodies and our narratives, to not make others uncomfortable. Don’t talk about the hot flash in the middle of the meeting. Don’t mention the sex that doesn’t conform to heterosexual scripts. Don’t say the words that would make this world too real, too embodied, too uncontainable.

But queering menopause means breaking that silence. It means letting the heat come, letting the sweat bead and drip, letting the mess of transformation take up space. It means speaking about the way desire shifts — not necessarily lessening, but changing its shape, its object, its urgency.

I think of Audre Lorde, who wrote that caring for oneself is not self-indulgence, but self-preservation — and that self-preservation is an act of political warfare. In menopause, that feels truer than ever. When I take a midday nap instead of pushing through exhaustion, when I let my body rest instead of forcing it into productivity, I am participating in that same warfare. I am saying: I am not a machine. I am a living organism in flux.

The patriarchal gaze frames menopause as decline, a vanishing. But queerness has always been about vanishing from systems that harm us — and then reappearing in our own forms. The disappearance isn’t death; it’s transformation.

There is something gloriously queer about no longer being beholden to anyone’s timeline — not the body’s, not the culture’s. I find myself, now, listening to rhythms that have nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with intuition. My energy comes in waves that don’t align with lunar cycles anymore, but they do align with creativity, with rest, with honesty.

I used to fear losing touch with that part of myself that bled with the moon, that ancient synchrony with other women. Now I see that I haven’t lost it; it’s simply changed frequency. I am still part of the web — but my thread hums at a different pitch.

The body teaches us everything we need to know about impermanence, if we’re willing to listen. In my twenties, I learned it through heartbreak. In my thirties, through motherhood. Now, in my forties, it arrives through heat — this molten clarity that burns away illusion.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when I wake drenched in sweat, I feel like I’m being rewritten from the inside out. My skin prickles, my thoughts blur, and then something shifts — an old grief releases, or a new truth dawns. Maybe this is what the mystics meant when they spoke of purification by fire.

Perimenopause isn’t a disease. It’s an initiation. It asks us to let die what no longer serves: people-pleasing, invisibility, the relentless drive to prove our worth. It asks us to befriend the body as it changes shape and function. It asks us to see that what we are losing — the ability to conceive, the smoothness of skin, the illusion of permanence — was never the source of our power anyway.

Our power lies in our consciousness. In our capacity to adapt. In our willingness to keep becoming. So when I think about this “disease,” I laugh. I laugh because the culture has it backward. The real illness is the belief that our value ends when our fertility does. The cure is the heat itself — the internal combustion that clears the fog and reveals the truth.

And maybe that’s what the hot flash really is: not a malfunction, but a flare. A signal fire. The body saying, Wake up. You are not dying. You are evolving.

Photo Credit: Nicole Roberts