399: What if a hormonal disorder rewrote your identity?

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening, add free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi listeners. Last week I launched a sub-stack called Beyond the Story and I'm so grateful to everyone who subscribed. It's really been so meaningful to share my reflections there and to hear from you all. So if you haven't subscribed yet, I'd love to see you there. You'll find an article I wrote about why I started the show, as well as some of my own mental health struggles that form the basis of the storytelling that we do here. You'll also find an article reflecting on last week's episode, as well as one on this week's episode that I just posted today. To subscribe, go to witmissildine.substack.com. Again, it's called Beyond the Story at witmissildine.substack.com. It's free and I'm thrilled to share this new addition to the show with you. And now on to today's episode. What if a hormonal disorder rewrote your identity? I lived this life that I thought was me and then I woke up that day and that life didn't feel like me. The house I was in didn't feel like my house. The neighborhood that I lived in felt like someone had transplanted me there. The routine that I went through day by day just felt like it belonged to somebody else. From Wondery, I'm witmissildine. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 399. What if a hormonal disorder rewrote your identity? Know how true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci-fi story it was based on, or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive True Crime podcast. However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts, plans now start at £5.99. Audible, be fascinated, be fascinating. Episode 499. My parents grew up in what my mother affectionately calls the Catholic ghetto. In the city where I grew up, there's a lot of immigrant communities that were sort of Catholic. There's a lot of Irish and Italians and Germans. And all of these communities were sort of multi-generational communities that were really tied together by their affiliation with the church. One of the characteristics of that Catholic environment that they grew up in, especially that immigrant Catholic environment, was that people just didn't talk about things. They didn't talk about the history. They didn't talk about family going back to the old country. And they didn't talk about problems or challenges that they were having. Everything was kind of built around the idea that, you know, you had to be tough to survive in a new land. And if you had problems, that was what the church was for. So there was rarely any comfort level with talking about your challenges. And it was especially the case for mental health issues. My family members came to the States from Ireland during the time of the famine there. So they came from a very traumatic environment and often came to the States in a way that broke up families. So I think that really explains why it was really hard for people to talk about the past or history. Both of my parents were beautiful people. My mother was beauty queen and my father was a superstar at local sports. You know, their relationship felt like, you know, being the king and the queen of the prom. There was a status associated with all that that really gave them both, I think, a sense of success and happiness. My parents did get pregnant at a wedlock and that was totally unacceptable to particularly my mother's parents. So they were rushed into a marriage and they just decided to make it work or they just decided that they had a great enough relationship and it was fine. My earliest memories are actually kind of positive because when I was young, we were a fun family. Like I remember when I was a little, little kid, my dad loved music and my mom loved dancing. And so they would put on records and they would start dancing around the house and we would all jump in and dance together. And I just remember that so positively. Money was always a problem in my family. My mother felt like we should have more money than we did. But of course, there was no family money and it didn't work out very well because while my mother was always willing to work, she really felt like her main job should be as a mother. And my father was just one of these guys that was very willing and able to show up to a job. But he was not someone who really enjoyed working. He was not ambitious. So money was a constant problem. My father was also a bit of a flanderer. But I personally would say that the biggest problem in the house was that people were not really willing to confront challenges or problems in an open and honest way. So there was a lot of deflection and a lot of repressed emotion. When I was a kid, I found the grandeur and the ritual of Catholicism quite fascinating. I kind of ate all that up. But I didn't particularly like the authoritarianism of the church. The thou shalt do this and thou shalt not do that. I'm a little bit too much of an independent person and I really want to understand the why and those questions were not always welcome in that setting. And my father had a brother. They grew up in the 50s in Baltimore. And my father's brother was one of the children that was abused by a priest in the Catholic Church. He tried to tell his family about that. But his family was not. He tried to tell his family about that. But his family was so afraid of the power of the church that they refused to believe him. They refused to support him. And as a consequence of that, he developed very severe addiction problems and mental health problems. My parents, they never said anything about this experience to me or to my brother. Their way of dealing with it was just to cut him out of our lives. We want you to not know about these very bad things that did happen or could happen. My parents did this because they thought it was the right thing to do. And their parents treated my uncle that way because they thought it was the right thing to do. But it was the wrong thing to do. It ruined his life. And it didn't teach any of the important lessons we really need to know. Up until the point where adolescents and puberty started to kick in, I was a pretty happy kid, pretty independent and curious about the world. And, you know, I felt like we had a pretty decent family environment. So, I mean, there was a lot of good in our world. And then things just took a turn once I got to middle school. I got my first piece of paper. I got my first piece of paper. I got my first period when I was 12 years old. That would have been in 1980. And almost immediately after getting a period, I started to notice that my mood would change really aggressively and violently. I very commonly experienced a kind of manic depression or bipolar experience where moods would ping-pong back and forth between a lot of high energy and high enthusiasm and feeling very excited. And then all of that just simply stopping at completely random moments. And a very severe kind of depression that made it very difficult to function or to think clearly. Another symptom that I would point to was that it can make you very impulsive. And although I'm not an impulsive personality, I did a lot of things, particularly when I was younger, that were really risky or really out of character for me. At the same time, I started very quickly to experience chronic and compulsive suicidal thoughts. Which obviously for someone who's 12 years old and who has never really experienced that before, was very traumatic, but also just very confusing. Those compulsive thoughts felt to me like in a message from my emotional self. I feel bad. I don't want to feel bad. The best way to make that happen is to end it all. It was very scary. It was very scary. And it was strange because up until the point of puberty hitting, I really had viewed myself as a pretty confident, positive-minded person. And I knew in my mind that I did not want to end it all. I liked my life well enough and I was a pretty happy person otherwise. Talking to my parents about any of that felt like it would be absolutely explosive. Some of that's because my mother did have this all-consuming desire to keep things positive, keep things positive. My father was just disengaged. So there was no natural kind of opening there. And there was no precedent for it in the family. The message in my family was always power through, power through, power through. And that's what I figured I had to do. Ignore whatever was happening in my head and just power through. As it happened, it was at that exact time of my life that my parents' marriage began to break apart and the emotional landscape of my family really darkened at that same time. My mother became aware that my father had been cheating on her. And this led to some really explosive fighting and anger and just an incredibly negative environment in the house. So I never really came to understand that the experiences that I was having were associated with some chemical things that were going on in my brain. For me, they were a consequence of bad things that were going on in my environment. My father decided to leave my mother when I was 13 and they both kind of spun out. So my mother opted to get into a relationship with the total alcoholic. I wouldn't say he was a violent drunk, but he was a very aggressive drunk. My father, he ended up marrying a woman who was nine years older than I was. So I was 13 and she was 22. And she already had a daughter too. And he just threw himself into that family and seemingly forgot that we existed. And everything about that relationship gave me the ick. And I definitely blamed myself. I definitely felt like, you're just not dealing with this stuff well. You've got to pick it up. You've got to figure this out on your own. The suicidal thoughts though, they were really quite terrifying. The worst days for me were the ones where I had a series of visions in my mind about ways that I could die. I would go to school and I would be in English class. English class was on the second floor of the building. So I would sit there and I would imagine myself racing to the window and leaving out. That visual was in my head, not just one time, but over and over and over. Then I would leave that class and I would go to study hall. And study hall would be on the first floor by the library. But in the library had a fireplace and I could see myself thrusting my hands into the fire or grabbing a log and running with them. Difficult for me to talk about it, but this is truly what was happening in my head. And it would go on all day. All day long. What I was experiencing was something called PMDD, which stands for Promenstrual Disporic Disorder. And it's like PMS except turned up to 11. It's a condition where the fluctuation of hormones in your mind has a really profound impact on your perception. But I didn't know that's what it was at the time. I was never diagnosed with it, certainly not back in those days. It can be experienced in a lot of different ways. For most women, the issue happens like the week before they get their period. Where you're experiencing intense mood swings, you might be experiencing severe physical symptoms, pain, discomfort, you might be experiencing a lot of emotional confusion or brain fog. It's really common, but it's also very common with PMDD to experience suicidal thoughts. So about 5% of women have PMDD, but something like 30% of women who have PMDD have reported that at some point in their life they attempted suicide. So it's a common reaction to the problem. One of the features of PMDD is that it doesn't necessarily correspond cleanly with your monthly cycle. So for me personally, the on-again, off-again nature of those symptoms was not clearly tied to my monthly period. So that was another reason that it was hard for me to understand what I was experiencing. I remember a lot of these moments, honestly, where I would be sitting at class in school or be at home doing something innocuous and suddenly it was almost like a finger snap happened. I could think clearly and I felt completely different. I noticed when that happened. Like I noticed how differently I felt all of a sudden. And although I never really understood why I was going back and forth with these thoughts, these moods, I did understand that when I felt more normal, that was the real me. And the rest of it was something else that was coming upon me. I just had to keep telling myself a story about who I was in order to kind of make sense of how I was feeling and where I wanted to go with my life. Because I didn't know how to talk about it or who to talk to, that started a process for me of disassociating from my emotions. On the surface, I was emotionally dissociated, so I would just be very placid looking and quiet. But internally, I was experiencing so many conflicting emotions at once that I really couldn't think. I really struggled to stay on top of school work and it made it really difficult to engage in a lot of social stuff. I had friends, you know, I had some friends, a few of which were good friends, but you know, I didn't feel like I could talk to them about much that was happening in my mind. The thing that I felt the most about it was just confusion. I didn't understand why my days would be one way on one day and another way on another day. I really focused on a through line of I really want to be alive. I really want to make it to my future. I do like myself and I want to live my life. I just really focused on that through line and just kind of disconnected from everything else. I really wanted to be alive. I really wanted to be alive. I really wanted to be alive. I really wanted to be alive. I really wanted to be alive. I really wanted to be alive. I really wanted to be alive.哎哎哎 or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge the whole series ad-free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app. I'm Razer Jaffrey and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr. A. Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, a fixed man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business before the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons. Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who sold nuclear secrets to Iran early at ad-free on Audible. I became sexually active when I was 19. It was not too long after that. I was 20, actually, when I decided to go on birth control. When I found the right type of birth control, I began to notice that I didn't struggle as much with the suicidal thoughts. It really was like birds and rainbows appeared. All of those terrifying thoughts and the emotions that were really related to them, I felt them all just lift and float away. And I felt free for the first time in my life. I understand now that taking birth control gave me a kind of hormonal regulation that led to an emotional regulation. But at the time, I still was not able to make that connection at all. It was not clear to me that taking the birth control was the reason that I was feeling better and able to kind of go on and live a more normal life. Instead, I thought that it was the opportunity to get away from that bad family dynamic that had really messed up my teenage years and get away from my parents' relationships and have freedom and independence to direct my own life. I really thought that the circumstances were the reasons that I was feeling so much better. I felt that memory of those fearful, deadly thoughts and it would just come up and kind of get me from time to time. But it didn't impact my life all that much. I could mostly ignore it. The only way that it really impacted me was that I really did stay away from being in relationships with people. Because I spent so much time not having a good understanding of what I felt or what I was going to be like from day to day, it made me feel uncomfortable with letting people get closer to me because I didn't really know what person I was presenting to the world. I didn't know how I was going to react to different people that I met or different situations. I just kind of wanted to avoid people because I just didn't want to have to figure that problem out. Once I left college and I was not experiencing this PMDD on a month-to-month basis, I embarked on what was really a pretty normal life. I got a job in Chicago and I had many great years living the life in the big city and having a job. I met the man who would later become my husband while I was working that job in Chicago. By the time I met my husband, I felt like I was ready. I knew my husband for four years before we went on our first date. So he was kind of the perfect person for me to step out of this umbrella of anxiety about being in relationships with people. We had three kids. So I wasn't on birth control when I was pregnant, but I felt great when I was pregnant. And then after I had the kids, I got back on birth control relatively quickly. So even though I had a certain amount of hormonal drama around the kids, it was so easy to explain through the normal variations of hormones that you go through when you're pregnant. I had a career doing communications work for investment companies and eventually doing my kids with twins. And when the twins were born, I had to kind of think of a different way of going forward. So I sort of started a small business and I ended up doing that for more than 20 years. We bought a house and then we had more kids and we bought a bigger house. We lived in this great diverse neighborhood. I mean, you know, honestly, I was really happy with my life. You know, I was happy with my husband. We had some minor issues like any family does, but we were pretty happy. The kids were great. I love the neighborhood we lived in. I really thought in a lot of ways that I had kind of risen above the challenges that had defined my early life. My husband was a really good man and a really ethical man. He had good values and, you know, was very committed to the kids and to our family. However, he had undiagnosed ADHD and he also struggled a lot with social anxiety. But as he got older, his world started becoming smaller and smaller. And he didn't want to go anymore to the kids' school events. And he didn't want to do anything at all that was just in my world. He just kind of ended up getting smaller and smaller in just kind of going to work coming home and sitting on the couch all day. So by the end of my 40s, after almost 20 years of being together, we'd kind of reached this place where we were living separate-ish lives and didn't really communicate all that much with each other. It was very frustrating because not being able to communicate about feelings, I guess because of the world I grew up in, it makes me feel very unsafe. And it felt a little too like he was abandoning me. I don't think that that's necessarily the truth, but that is how it felt. I wasn't really thinking in terms of it was inevitable that we had to separate or divorce. I just thought maybe we could find ways to deal with it more once we didn't have the kids to deal with all the time. Reflecting back to what my parents' marriage had been and how spectacularly it had come apart. And from my perspective, how bad their lives got after that divorce, it really prompted a lot of anxiety for me to sort of imagine that in my mind. My oldest at that time was probably about 14 or 15 years old and my twins were like 12. And it was really easy to throw myself into the work, the work of keeping the business going, the work of paying the bills, the work of managing the kids. There was always plenty to do. I just kind of didn't want to deal too deeply with emotions that scared me. But every now and then they would sort of come up, I would call them the black dogs. I would have black dog days. And then I would just kind of take a few deep breaths and power through. I turned 50 in August of 2018 and exactly one month later, I woke up from a spicy dream about a woman, which was totally new. I had never experienced that before. So that was surprising. I also woke up feeling like I was not the same person that I was the day before. I was feeling a torrent of emotions that I had not felt since I was a teenager. I was feeling a lot of emotions, a lot of contradictory emotions at one time. And also that I was feeling emotions that felt like was settled when I became an adult. I clearly had a very different reaction, physically and sexually, to the world, to women. But I was also feeling this sense of alienation from that kind of person that I was. It was very destabilizing. Like it felt like I had walked out on a plank and jumped off of a ship that I'd been on for 30 years. It's a struggle to articulate the experience, but alienation is a good word because it sort of says, I lived this life that I thought was me and then I woke up that day and that life didn't feel like me. The house I was in didn't feel like my house. The neighborhood that I lived in felt like someone had transplanted me there. The friends and acquaintances that I had in that place felt like strangers. The routine that I went through day by day just felt like it belonged to somebody else. And what was really strange about it was that I wasn't unhappy with any of those things. I felt very confused and it was a familiar confusion. The confusion was the first sign for me that I was experiencing something similar to what I'd gone through in puberty. I was pretty angry actually because I thought I had laid all this stuff to rest. And not only was all that stuff coming back, but it was coming back a little different in a way that I didn't necessarily know how to deal with. And honestly, I mean, the truth is that it really scared the shit out of me. I felt like those feelings, those emotions that were around wanting to end my life, I knew that they were coming back and it didn't take long before they started to. Over the course of the next, I would say month or two, I started experiencing the physical symptoms of perimenopause like the hot flashes and the emotional ups and downs. But I started experiencing them in this extremely intense way. So my hot flashes could sometimes last four or six hours. And they always had a lot of associated symptoms like headaches and nausea and heart palpitations and a sense that I couldn't breathe. That physical sense that you can't breathe is a really tough one. It usually started with a headache, but it wasn't a normal headache. It felt like a lightning bolt that would hit behind your forehead. It would affect my vision. I wouldn't be able to see clearly. I might have that for 20 minutes or half an hour. And then the headache would kind of resolve into a sense of nausea. And the nausea was pretty intense. It was not the sort of nausea where you're like, oh, my stomach feels funny. It was the sort of nausea where you have to go lie down. And then that would usually resolve into the heart palpitations. Those could last for an hour. And again, what I feel throughout is this very profound feeling like there is something wrong in your body. The heart palpitations would resolve when the hot flash would happen. And a hot flash is really like when your skin feels like it's on fire, like I was crawling out of my skin. Really. For me, that could go on for hours. Like physically, I just couldn't function. I didn't have the kind of life at that point where I could just stay in bed all day. But I really was just a zombie walking around the house just trying to accomplish the bare minimum because I just couldn't function. Your brain doesn't work at all when this is happening. You cannot take any new information. You cannot process problems. You cannot remember things. You cannot problem solve. The suicidal thoughts came back and along with it came mood swings that were so extreme that they really boarded on manic depressive. I had days where I would go into the yard and I would build a fire in the fire pit and I would just sit and watch the fire all day because that was literally all that I could do. I just was unavailable to the world because I was too depressed to move or think. Then two days later, I'd hit a manic phase and I would do all the work I needed to do for that week and that one day because I would just be so full of energy that I was just like, I got to get it done because I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. All of the depressive thoughts, they were chronic. They were compulsive and they just kept going and going and going and going all day long. I was feeling such a sense of panic and fear as this was going on because it takes a lot of energy when you have those kind of chronic thoughts and I didn't know if I had the resiliency to deal with those thoughts the way that I had before. I definitely put up a facade around my family. I knew that my husband couldn't really deal with it. I did try to tell him that I was experiencing these challenges and that it was making it tough for me to kind of play the role as primary kid manager and house manager. But at that time, he did not have a lot of energy to give so he just kind of shoved and didn't really say anything back. But I was lucky in that I had some really good lifelong friends who I could talk to about this stuff and they didn't understand what I was experiencing. Their particular experiences with paramedic pause were really different from mine. But they could at least listen and laugh at some of the craziness of it all and say encouraging things and one of the encouraging things that they said was you really need to get some support. I did a lot of my own research and I found quite a lot of really compelling studies that have been done and used that to have a conversation with my medical providers at the time and they agreed. I'm fortunate that I have caring doctors, but in their world there isn't a treatment for PMDD that is all that specific. But they did point me toward mood stabilization drugs and those drugs definitely helped. It took a little while, but I found the right group of drugs to deal with the physical and emotional symptoms or at least get them more narrow so that I could function on a day-to-day basis. So that just left this other big chunk which was suddenly I'm extremely attracted to women and I'm experiencing that pretty strongly pretty much every day. And where did that come from? And what do I do about that? I would see women just in my neighborhood and I would literally like turn and stare. It was a completely new thing. I've never done that before. It wasn't anything in my mind when I was doing that. I was just responding to something physical. I mean it was kind of crazy. I mean like my goodness. I mean it was very intense and it was very real. I did feel pretty strongly that I did not want to be in a relationship with a man. And that was a little problematic because I was in a relationship with a man. I was really struggling with this question of is this change in me real? Or is it just some temporary weirdness like all this other weirdness that's happening? Is it going to last? Do I want to blow up my life for something that I don't know what it is or how real it is? I had a 20-year marriage to a good man who had done good things. He had done right by me and done right by my kids. We had a really nice life in a nice community. I mean you know I liked my life and I was proud of my life because I felt like I had to work hard to achieve it. So having to reconsider the marriage meant blowing up a whole life that I'd spent so much time working for. And it meant losing somebody that I really did love even if maybe our relationship was a little stale. And it meant maybe walking into what could be a much worse situation afterwards because I had seen my parents walk into a much worse situation afterwards. I knew it would be harmful to him. I knew it would hark him. And I absolutely didn't want to do that. It was a real tug-of-war. I had to figure out if it was real because it's part of my personal belief system that I need to live my life honestly and to try to make sure that I choose a life that reflects who I am and how I feel. If it was real and if it was permanent, I had to live my life that way because I couldn't hide it. I wouldn't be happy. And I don't think it's ethical or moral to pretend to be something that you're not. So I knew I was going to have to change stuff if it was real. And so that was the first order of business was exploring it to whatever degree I could and trying to reach some kind of conclusion that I could have confidence in. Talking about my feelings really honestly with a therapist certainly helped a lot. But what I really needed was time. I needed time. I spent a year of my life just exploring my feelings and waiting to see what happened. The therapist could really help me to explore where the feelings were coming from to see how my feelings were influenced by my history. But the reality was that I was going to have to come to that conclusion on my own. So I took a year. I took a year to just honestly to see how I felt day by day. After a year I felt the same and I felt like that's enough time to move forward. I had to talk to my husband first and I tried to be very open with him about I don't know where this came from. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know where to go from here. And I guess I was kind of hoping that it would be something that we could maybe look at together. He wasn't horrified or aghast by anything but he also was like I don't want to be a part of this conversation. I don't want to be a part of this problem solving. Like you just decide what you want and that'll be that. I mean that was kind of a tough moment for me because I really felt like it would be easier to figure out what my path forward is if we could do it together. But I guess I felt like my ex-husband was right. Like I had to decide. I made the decision to embrace this change in my sexuality. And I did reach that place where I was like regardless of how many problems I'm going to bring into my life by doing it, I have to acknowledge that this has happened and that I need to live my life this way. And once I did that, I very quickly had to start thinking about how I was going to tell everybody else. God bless the children of today. That's all I can say. Because literally, I mean I sat the kids down and I said we were planning a divorce. We didn't go into too much detail about why. You know, we just used that opportunity to assure them that we were going to prioritize making sure that they were okay. And then a month after that, I sat them down and I said I think I'm going to start dating women. Bless their hearts. They literally were like, okay, they genuinely didn't care. It was awesome. Because I really didn't know how I was going to deal with it if it really upset them. I told my brother, he was very supportive, told my father, he was like, I don't care. Told my good friends and they were all very happy for me that I had reached a decision point and that I was going to embrace the reality of it. It's tough telling my mother. And the reason that's tough is that mom is still really stuck in that sense of there's religion that tells you what's right and wrong and there's the right kind of families and she has a lot of very traditional conservative mindsets about that. She was not comfortable with it. But she was more accepting than I expected her to be, which I appreciated. Honestly, the hardest was telling my group of acquaintances. For example, at that time, I had a good friend in the neighborhood and we coached youth basketball together. It was a man who I was good friends with. And then there were parents that I got to know because I was coaching their sons or their daughters. So coming out in that world was really hard. I was really hard because there absolutely was some judgment there. It was a lengthy process of putting yourself out there and having people just turn away. I know that there were people in the community who would talk about me and I didn't care about it all that much, but I knew it was happening and I had to be able to just let that go. I was really lucky to get a really good therapist. She really helped me to see that there's no reason this would have to make my life worse. I talked a lot about my anxieties about breaking up my marriage and that memory in my mind of my parents and how they had made some really tough choices after their divorce. She was a really strong voice in my head saying it doesn't have to be that way. Having really good friends that I could joke with was hugely helpful to me. Starting the process of dating, it was very scary. It was very scary because I really didn't know what I was looking for and I didn't really know what I wanted. It's also true that I wasn't sure yet that this was a permanent change. So when I started to date again, I made dates with both women and men. I mean, it was almost like having to experiment with myself, which is a really strange sensation when you're in your 50s. You'd like to think that you've got a better grip on things than that, but I didn't. So I connected with a couple of men and I found those dates went really horribly, which was useful to say, okay, this definitely is not a path I am responding well to. So then it was a question of connecting with women. There were just a lot of different kinds of people that I talked to and that I met. And I just got really, really lucky because I was on the apps and I saw a photograph of this woman wearing a sort of ridiculous winter hat with the ear flaps and with a dog climbing up on her lap, these beautiful brown eyes. And I just reacted to it immediately. We started talking back and forth and it was a beautiful conversation, right? It was straightforward and honest. And she is also someone who was married to a man for 20 years and kind of embraced who she is much later in life. So we had a lot to talk about. We were really interested in one another, but we weren't in a rush. So we dated like that for like about four months. And then I was able to finish the separation from my husband. And once we had a lot of time together, then things happened very quickly. We both really had a lot of pent up desire. And it was just, oh, it was great. It was fabulous. There's two things that I really learned. The one is that you can't hide away from your feelings forever. Feelings can be messy and they can be chaotic and they can take you to places you don't want to go. And you don't have to respond to every emotion that you have, but you have to be able to listen to them. And I know that that may be obvious to other people. It was not obvious to me. People always talk about trusting your gut, but my gut was always trying to tell me to kill myself. So I didn't feel like I could do that. So it took a lot for me to get to a place where I could listen to my gut and trust that I would end up in a good spot. I spent a lot of time over the course of my life trying to understand why I feel the way I feel on any given day. And the answers that I came to when I was a teenager didn't make sense anymore when I was an adult. And then the answers that I came to when I was an adult didn't make sense anymore when I was going into menopause. But everything that you experience in life kind of starts with how your body is and how it functions. And you want to try to understand it with your brain, but it just doesn't really work that way. It definitely gives you a perspective on what you can know, how much you can't know, and how you need to kind of embrace both the known and unknown as you go through life. And the more I think that you can accept the things you can't understand about yourself as much as anything else, the stronger you are as you deal with all the unknowns. There is a leap of faith that is required. And sometimes the only way that you can really know the answers to your questions is to do something that you don't know if it's the right thing. The hardest thing for me was I had to deconstruct an entire life that I had carefully built over decades, which obviously is a very challenging thing. But what made it really difficult for me was that when I look back at that life, I felt so much like a lot of the decisions that I made were kind of dictated by what I should do, what I should want. I had to look at things that I thought were really important to me, and I had to acknowledge how much of them was not reflecting my own values and my own desires and my own feelings. I think the thing that really was toughest and is still tough in some ways was kind of acknowledging that the things that I really felt so sure about in my previous life weren't always built on what I care about the most, and I'm still dealing with them. I think when you get to your 50s, you kind of feel like the patterns of your life are really laid down. They certainly are in your brain. Your mind has a lot of deep grooves about how you live and how you work and how you relate with people and how you react to life happening, and all of those deep grooves, they don't work for me the way that they used to. So I have to be really patient with myself and take my time, and I have to respect my emotions and let them guide me, and that was not true before all this happened. I was always very intellectual, but I didn't really trust my emotions, so I was always very, what's the logical thing to do here? What's the smart thing to do here? What makes sense in my mind? And just ignore how I felt about it, and that's a deep groove for me. I still very quickly do that in my head, but I have come to understand through this experience that that's not going to leave me where I need to go right now. And I need to be patient, and I need to take my time and really get in touch with my emotions before I do anything. So I can touch base with what are my core values here so that I can make decisions that are right for me. I'm saying that and it sounds very simple, but it's really hard. Sometimes I get frustrated with having to go through this process of figuring out who I am now, and I do feel like it works in the long run. I don't like the process, but I do like the result. When I talk about how I had to really sort of deconstruct my earlier life, I think part of it was that I had to deconstruct the relationship with my husband. And my husband and I, we had a great sex life, and I really liked him in a lot of ways, but I'm not sure I ever really loved him in the way that you think about what love is. And I'm not sure he ever really loved me. There was something really missing at the heart of that. So when I found myself with a shiny new sexuality and a real desire to try to experience that, I also saw it as an opportunity to maybe look for the kind of intimate emotional connection that maybe was missing in that relationship. I feel like I know what love is now, and I don't think I knew that before. I think I felt like love meant things were buttoned up, and that is not what love is. Love is things are not buttoned up. It doesn't really matter. You just connect it to this person in ways that are just so important and nothing else really matters. It's never too late to be yourself. There were definitely moments when I was going through this very tumultuous period, and I had to face changing my life, where I thought, isn't it kind of too late for all that? I'm so locked into a life that I built, and is it really worth it to change all that? But it is worth it. It's worth it to be yourself. Every day is a lifetime, and every day that you spend being authentic to who you are is a joy, and makes anything that came before worthwhile. I was raised by parents who were very focused on how people should be. They were very focused on status, and they were very focused on the church, and they were very focused on rules about how people should do things, and I was really taught a lot of should. You should do this. You shouldn't do that. You should think this way. You should choose this. I was just given a lot of that kind of messaging when I was a kid, and I've come to a place where what I'm trying to do is eliminate all should from my life. There is no should. There's just how you feel, how you choose to act on it, and what the consequences of that are. You know, the should isn't about you, right? Like when people tell you what you should do, they're not talking about you. They're talking about themselves. There's just trying to do the best you can, and trying to reduce harm in the world as much as possible. You can't be the person that you think you should be, the person that you wish you were. You have to be the person that you are. You know, life has a lot of challenges to it, that the good things in life, they only come to you by being the person that you are, and this experience has really outlined that for me. I still don't know for sure if I'm the same person that I was before the Paramaniposal changes, or if I'm a different person. I have a different life now, and this life feels like me, and I'm very happy, and that's completely different from the life that I lived before, but that life felt very natural too. So I don't really know quite how to, you know, square the circle, but you know, even if I don't quite understand what happened, I can at least say to myself, I can look in the mirror and say, I'm living the best life I can. It is a privilege to be able to transform my life into something that's really different and experience life from that perspective. It's so terrifying, really, to move yourself out of one well-organized life into another, but if you can make it happen, if you make decisions based on how you truly feel, you can end up seeing the world from a really different perspective, and that is a privilege. So today's guest wishes to remain anonymous. If you'd like to reach out to her, you can find her email address in the show notes. Thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Naven, Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Lully, and Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velazquez. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at Actually Happening. On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com. You can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's ThisIsActuallyHappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening.