My Perimenopause Brain Is Full of Ideas and Absolutely No Plan

I am about five days from my period. Maybe four. It has become slightly less predictable lately, so who really knows.

And my brain is fuzzy today.

Not empty. Definitely not empty. Actually, I think I would prefer empty right now.

There are so many things in there. Things I want to write. Things I want to teach. Things I've already written and haven't done anything with. Workshops I could create. Workshops I've already half-created. Things I've been thinking about for years that suddenly feel relevant again.

I can feel all of them at once.

So naturally I decided what I need is a three-month plan.

This is how my mind works.

I am overwhelmed because there are too many things, so obviously the solution is to organize ALL OF THE THINGS.

Okay. Fine. Three months. Monthly priorities. Weekly reviews. Nothing too rigid because I know myself well enough to know I will eventually rebel against a plan I made for myself because I don't like being told what to do.

Perfect.

What am I planning?

Well, my work.

Right.

What work?

Fuck.

And suddenly I'm not making a three-month plan anymore. I'm trying to answer the existential question of what exactly I am doing with my life.

Who am I talking to? What am I trying to say? How do I tell people what I do? What do I actually do? What am I offering? Do I even have anything to offer?

I should probably create something.

But what?

Except I already have approximately seven hundred things I've created and haven't done anything with.

Okay. So maybe I don't need to create something. Maybe I need to finish something.

Great.

What?

And now we're spinning.

This is the part where I start talking faster, because some part of my mind is convinced that if I can just keep up with the thoughts, eventually I will catch the one that explains all the others.

Because I can feel that it all makes sense.

That's the maddening part.

I just can't see the shape of it yet.

Meanwhile, my body is lying there going, We could also just not.

Fine. Maybe I need to rest first.

I'll do yoga nidra. That will settle everything and clear my brain, and then I'll get up

and be able to see what I need to do.

So I did.

For an hour.

I got up.

Still fuzzy.

Well, shit.

Apparently yoga nidra is not a vending machine where I insert sixty minutes of rest and receive one fully functioning executive brain.

And that's when I noticed that I had secretly made a deal with my body that I hadn't told my body about.

I'll give you an hour if you give me my brain back.

Which isn't really rest, is it?

It's productivity wearing a little eye mask.

That made me laugh, but it also made me wonder how often I do this. Even "honouring my body" can become another strategy for getting more out of her.

So instead of asking how I was going to get out of this state, I started wondering what would happen if I simply leaned in and asked what wanted to be.

My mind's next brilliant idea was a master list.

No planning. No organizing. I would just gather everything I already had and figure it out later.

Except I couldn't even do that.

I opened the document and my whole being basically said, Absolutely not.

And this is where the day became more interesting.

Because I wasn't actually lacking energy.

My brain was fuzzy, but there was an enormous amount of creative energy moving through my body. I wanted to create so badly I could practically crawl out of my skin.

I just didn't want to think about creating.

There was a distinction there I had almost missed.

My mind wanted to use my brain to organize my life.

My body wanted to use all of me to make something.

So I stopped trying to make the list.

I put on music.

I started singing. Then dancing. Then channeling light language. I recorded a short.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I could feel myself again.

Not because the fuzziness disappeared.

I had just stopped requiring it to disappear before I could create.

It was almost as if my body had been saying all afternoon:

We're not here to think right now. We're here to do.

Not productivity-doing. Not checking things off a list.

Embodied doing.

Singing. Moving. Making sound. Letting something come through before my mind had decided what it was for.

And then, after all of that, I sat down and wrote this.

Which makes me laugh.

I had enough creative capacity to sing and dance and channel and record something and write an essay about the entire experience.

I just couldn't make a fucking list.

And that feels like useful information.

Because the question wasn't Why can't I think?

It was Why am I insisting that thinking is what I should be doing?

I've been paying much more attention to my menstrual cycle lately, particularly as I move through perimenopause and notice the landscape changing within me.

There are days when my brain feels incredibly quick and capable, when I can hold a complicated idea and see its shape almost immediately. And then there are days like today when the sorting mechanism seems to disappear.

And I'm beginning to wonder whether this is what menstrual awareness is becoming for me.

Not another system to master. Not another calendar telling me which days I'm supposed to create and which days I'm supposed to rest. God knows I don't need another authority telling me what Tuesday is for.

Maybe it's simply noticing:

This is the body I have today.

This is the brain I have today.

What does she actually have capacity for?

I love understanding myself. Give me physiology, psychology, astrology, Human Design, symbolism, hormones—I will happily examine myself from seventeen different angles.

But there is a subtle trap there too. Am I using those frameworks to justify and grant myself permission to do what I intuitively knew I needed?

See? This is why I'm fuzzy.

See? I'm allowed to rest.

Today I discovered that rest wasn't actually the whole answer either.

My body didn't want me to stop. She wanted to be heard. To use her zone of genius that day. Not force her to conform to what I thought she should be doing.

I'm always going to be on the quest of understanding myself. I'll be eighty years old, surrounded by books, trying to understand why I had a particular thought at breakfast!

But understanding myself and requiring an explanation before I trust myself are not quite the same thing.

I want to sing is enough.

I need to move is enough.

Even I don't want to make the fucking list is enough.

I don't need external confirmation or validation from external sources. I need deeper trust in myself.

And that's what listening to my body did today. It's a practice. It's an experiment. I don't always get it correct on the first try.

And then, I search for the confirmation afterwards - out of curiosity. (and yes, everything that was happening was in total alignment with Human Design and Astrology, and my cycle!)

I still don't have the three-month plan.

I still haven't made the master list.

My brain is still fuzzy.

But I sang. I danced. I channeled. I created something. And then I wrote this.

I just couldn't do what my mind had decided I should be doing.

Because my body had an entirely different idea.

I'm glad I listened.