I consider myself as having two careers – my writing career that flourished for years until my health took a dive. And my corporate career that has sandwiched that writing career and is currently my main source of income. In this article, I’m talking about my corporate career (though without a doubt my symptoms have had a significant impact on both).
Today, I hit ‘submit’ on an application to reduce my work hours from 5 days per week to 4. We’re not talking compressed hours where I cram 5 days of work into 4 and get to take a bumper day off. Nope. We’re talking about the reduced pay, reduced holiday, reduced pension kind of reduction. The kind that hits in all the ways you don’t want.
As I hit submit, it wasn’t a sense of joy or excitement that overcame me. It was a huge rush of unproductive emotions: anger, frustration, fear, sadness and shame. This isn’t a day of my life I’m stealing back from the corporate world in order to go hiking, indulge in long weekends in Paris or spend more time on my writing. Sadly, this is an extra day ‘for me’ so I can lie down and feel bad.
Despite being on the full stack of HRT, my daily level of functioning is low and seemingly getting lower month on month. After 11 years of perimenopause, I’ve learned that it can always get worse; and that’s exactly what seems to be happening.
Barely scraping myself through each day before collapsing onto the sofa, I’m increasingly finding myself heading into the weekend so drained that the weekend i no longer long enough to give me the recharge I need. We’re not talking about a packed weekend social calendar, either. We’re talking about dinner with my partner and an early night. Hardly high octane stuff. Yet, come Monday morning, I wake up feeling like I’ve been out clubbing all weekend and have been hit by a truck on the way home. Sometimes, this is on top of 11 hours of sleep.
Something has to give and since my body is refusing to perform at even the most basic level, but given my mortgage company doesn’t seem keen on writing off the debt, I’m trapped in this liminal space where I’m neither thriving at my career nor optimising my soon to be gained extra free day.
Ask me 20 years ago and I’d have thought a 4-day week was the start of living the dream (and wondering how to bring it down to 3). Me of now? Is that shame I’m feeling. Shame at my inability to do a job that is designed for someone 15 years my junior. Is it fear I’m feeling? Fear that despite running the numbers again and again, that in the midst of my brain fog that I got it wrong and I’ll have to go back to scraping my way through 5 days a weak. Sadness that I will spend my day off lying down, feeling grim, feeling hopeless and sad, but trapped in a body and mind that won’t allow me to do anything about it. But perhaps above all I’m feeling angry. Angry that I’m a woman and because, through no fault of my own, my hormones have turned me from a successful, high-functioning woman in a shadow of the person I was, and there isn’t a menopause policy in the world that will let me treat this like it’s a ‘real’ illness.
Don’t get me wrong, my workplace does have a meno policy. I applaud them for that. We also have a generous sick leave policy of 3-months full sick pay. But what happens if you’re not ‘classic’ sick. Absent surgery or a broken leg or a depressive episode, the sick policy can’t cover what I need. It’s not possible to take that three months one day a week over the period of a year or two as I try to wrangle my hormones and body into some survivable state.
Instead, I hit submit and swallowed the reality. Reduced pay. Reduced annual leave. Reduced pension. Reduce opportunities to progress. All so I can have an extra lie down.
Have your hormones had an impact on your career? I’d love to know in the comments below.