I see funny everywhere.

There isn’t a moment in my life — and I’ve had some pretty dark ones — where I have failed to unearth the funny. Laughter is my oxygen; I can’t live without it. None of us can. It brings us relief, unites us, and provides much-needed perspective. Throughout my losses, disappointments, heartbreaks and humiliations, there has always been something comical: a moment, a feeling, a joke that comes to the surface and helps soothe the pain.

It isn’t always obvious. There have been moments and incidents where I’ve really had to dig deep and get forensic about finding something to even smile about. But somehow, I always manage. 

Then came menopause.

Of all the things I have experienced in my life, menopause has in many ways been the most difficult to deal with. Its symptoms stayed hidden, lurking camouflaged among the other painful experiences of my past, and because of that, it was completely invisible to me. 

How can you find the funny when you can’t even identify what exactly you’re supposed to be laughing at?

I didn’t see menopause coming. Even though I was aware it was one of those inevitable events in every woman’s life, it completely caught me off-guard.

Like many of us, I bought into the dangerous narrative that it was a “fuss about nothing.” Just a bit of dryness and maybe some night-sweats as the hormonal train leaves the station. Little did I know that I was tied to the tracks and that hormonal crash was going to run me over, disrupt my whole life and leave me physically and psychologically devastated.

Even scarier, I was clueless that what I was experiencing was due to menopause. I assumed it was just ageing or some ‘other thing’ that happens to women. Because a lot seems to happen – and keep happening - to women’s bodies. 

Our bodies are like one continuous episode of The White Lotus. Just when you check in at a nice resort, looking forward to a relaxing time away from the pressures of the real world with the people you love, someone finds a body at the beach, you discover your husband is having an affair and the sex-worker engaged by the guy in the next room is singing in the lounge and somehow blackmailing you.

And you just deal with it. Like you dealt with unwanted hair sprouting in odd places, period pain, the pungent aroma of adolescence, pregnancy, childbirth, etc. You learn to manage the symptoms and just keep going.

But for me, menopause was completely unmanageable.

It impacted every aspect of my life: my marriage, my friendships, my work, my body, my sleep — or lack thereof. Everyday ordinary things became unbearable: the traffic, inane conversations at the school gate, bad takeaway coffee, back pain, listening to the symptoms of man flu related in painstaking detail, navigating online payments — did I mention traffic?

Long story long… everything felt impossibly, confusingly difficult and acutely painful.

Menopause overwhelmed me and froze me into inaction.

It filled me with doubt, uncertainty, and fear and I couldn’t move myself to do anything about it. I became unrecognisable: paralysed, brain-fogged Mary, riddled with ignorance and devoid of hormones.

Then one morning, when I could barely lift myself out of bed, when the heaviness of my chest could no longer be ignored, and when my tears seemed to be auditioning — yet again — for Niagara Falls: The Non-Musical, it struck me! I knew what was happening.

How could I have missed the myriad clues? I slid sideways out of bed, somehow got to my feet, shuffled into the kitchen and blurted out to my confused husband, “It’s menopause! It must be menopause!”

Finally, I’d cracked it. 

Well, I’d been cracking it a lot at every small thing, but this was the good kind of “cracking it” like when they solve a cold case on TV. The culprit had been found. And the culprit was… me. 

Well, what was happening to me.

In an instant, the world opened up and relief was in sight. I inhaled books, articles and websites. I discovered treatments, Instagram accounts by a plethora of informed, inspiring women stepping to the fore to help — a number that’s growing every day.

Thanks to them, and the resources they provide, menopause is moving from something we have had to suffer through quietly in the shadows, to something we no longer need to face alone. 

Suddenly, I went from tired to inspired. Inspired to shed light on an issue that plunged me into isolation and darkness. To detoxify an archaic taboo with laughter. To along with so many others, help open the menopause closet door once and for all. 

To do my bit. 

And this book, MARYPAUSE is the first part of my contribution. 

My physical story anti-climaxing with menopause.

Part reflection, part memoir, it has allowed me to explore my unique experience of menopause — and why it hit me so hard – by looking at it in the context of my whole physical life. The complicated, painful, embarrassing and perplexing parts of being a woman. And the funny and fantastic parts too.

Its aim is to explore how powerful and powerless we can all be and a reminder that far too often, we’re not the ones running the show but that we’re at the mercy of a bunch of mysterious, elusive and sometimes unreliable things called hormones.

This book became a place where I could talk about those things. To put them somewhere people could find. To be of service in a small way to my sisters. My pussy posse. And maybe even to my besties with testes.

To the daughters, mothers, lovers, friends, co-workers of those women who, due to public disregard and medical neglect, find themselves where I was.

In hormonal exile. In avoidable hell. In the land of the lost. 

And what we have lost… is balance. Because without hormones, there is no balance, no communication with the body and so many of its primary functions, and without that, comes chaos and mayhem.

We’re forgetting, we’re sweating. We’re itchy, we’re bitchy. We’re aching, we’re faking. We’re foggy, we’re groggy.

And we’re losing… patience, hair, bone density, muscle mass, bladder control, tempers, marriages and jobs.

All because our hard-working hormones have taken indefinite long-service leave — with no intention of ever coming back.

Joni Mitchell once said, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

I don’t think Joni was talking about menopause when she wrote that.

Although I have no doubt that when she went through it herself, she would have seen how perfectly those lyrics applied.

But still, even with all that discomfort… we somehow continue to soldier on.

Because we haven’t retired, our ovaries have.

We’re faking it until we’re making it. Depleted and defeated… the show goes on. It’s not perfect. Far from it. And neither are we. Because when your body screams… sometimes, you do too.

I hope that in my foggy, sweaty, messy odyssey, you will find echoes of your own. And that in some way, this book makes you feel a little less alone.

So, read it straight through. Dip in and out. Pick it up when you need it. 

Maybe it will help you find your own funny.