The Covid Perimenopause Generation: Who am I now?

In 2021, during peak covid times, I’d been in and out of hospitals, doctors’ offices, and consultants’ rooms for most of the year. I was experiencing a whole cluster of symptoms that nobody could quite explain.

When nothing obvious showed up in the fairly basic, preliminary tests, the tone would shift:
“Maybe you’re just stressed? Have you thought about antidepressants? You might just need to get more rest, try to relax a bit.”

It was all said kindly enough, but it left me with an uncomfortable feeling that my experience was somehow up for debate, as if it needed a bit more proof to be taken more seriously. Underneath all of it was this niggling sense that maybe I was overreacting, or imagining things, or just generally being a bit too much.

And then, in a way that felt strangely abrupt after all the uncertainty and being dismissed, the pendulum swung the other way. Sitting across the desk from the third neurologist I saw, she told me my symptoms might be pointing towards something like a brain tumour or MS.

She said it plainly, efficiently, as if she were listing items on a shopping receipt.

I remember nodding politely, as you do in these situations when you’re trying to behave like a reasonable adult while your mind is rapidly spiralling. I left the neurologist’s office with that sentence lodged somewhere in my body, humming away in the background, and drove home crying into the steering wheel.

After that, life took on a strange, repetitive rhythm. I moved between hospitals and waiting rooms, through tests and more tests, learning far more than I ever wanted to about horribly painful lumbar punctures, nerve conduction studies, and brain MRIs.

Whole days were given over to appointments where something significant might be found, or not found, and not finding anything wasn’t nearly as reassuring as it sounds. There’s something particularly unsettling about being told everything looks “fine” when you feel anything but.

Over time, the not knowing starts to get under your skin. You begin to wonder if you’ve missed something, or explained it badly, or somehow failed to make it sound serious enough.

And then, more quietly, you start to question yourself.
Whether you’re overreacting.
Whether it might, in some impossible way, be all in your head.

All of this while your body continues, quite insistently, to tell you that something isn’t right.

After months of invasive neurological tests, appointments, and a final stay in hospital, I was discharged. The senior neurologist told me it might be a kind of “pre-MS” and to watch and wait. Which was about as reassuring as it sounds. I remember leaving the hospital with the distinct feeling that he’d handed me a bomb that may or may not go off, with very little guidance on what to do with it.

Eventually, partly out of frustration and partly because I couldn’t accept that this was just going to remain a question mark hanging over me, I went looking for answers myself. (I’m a stubborn bugger like that. I don’t tend to take “we don’t know” as a final answer).

This was before you could dump a list of symptoms into a chatbot and have it confidently tell you you’re either absolutely fine or on the brink of death. So it was late nights on Google, falling down Reddit threads, reading forums, ordering books, following anything that felt even vaguely familiar.

I went down every rabbit hole I could find, with the kind of persistence that comes from living in a body that doesn’t feel right and not being able to get a straight answer about why.

And that’s when perimenopause kept appearing.

At this point, you might be sighing and thinking, for God’s sake, not another perimenopause post.
I get it. But stay with me for a minute. At first, I almost dismissed it.

Perimenopause seemed too… obvious. Too ordinary, somehow. Not quite serious enough to account for the scale of what I was experiencing. And yet, the more I read, the more it began to knit things together in a way nothing else had.

Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally too. The anxiety that didn’t seem tied to anything in particular, the sudden drop in confidence that made me second-guess things I’d previously done without thinking, the low, persistent sense of being slightly out of sync with myself.
It wasn’t exactly a eureka moment, more a creeping suspicion that this might be the first explanation that actually fit.

What I didn’t fully appreciate then, and what feels much clearer now, is how much that experience was shaped by timing. Because all of this was happening in 2021, in the middle of the Covid years, when, like it was for so many of us, my world had become far smaller and quieter, and way more contained.

Which meant that alongside whatever was shifting for me in my body, the world around me had kind of folded in on itself. The casual interactions that usually give you a sense of yourself, the everyday back-and-forth of being with other people, the small confirmations of who you are in the world, all of that had thinned out or disappeared.

So there I was, dealing with a body that felt unfamiliar, and doing so at a time when there were fewer of the usual ways to recognise myself. It’s only with a bit of distance that I can see how much that combination mattered. And it’s something I now notice incredibly often in my coaching and therapy work.

Many of the clients I work with are in perimenopause, and again and again their stories seem to begin somewhere in those Covid years. They talk about a sense that something shifted during that time that hasn’t quite settled back into place.

I’ve found myself fondly thinking of them as the “Covid Perimenopause Generation.”

In our sessions, they describe something deeper than physical change. It’s a feeling of losing their foothold. The version of themselves that felt certain and steady is becoming harder to reach, leaving them with an unsettling sense that they are no longer quite anchored in their own lives. They talk about having once felt capable, steady, sure of themselves, and then finding that those qualities are slowly disappearing. They’re still there, but less reliable somehow. As if the internal scaffolding they’d quietly depended on has shifted, and things don’t feel quite as steady as they used to.

And at the same time, the external structures that once held things in place are shifting too. Careers plateau or pivot. Children grow up and need you differently. Relationships shift, sometimes deepening, sometimes coming under strain. Ageing parents require more care and attention. Your energy feels more finite, and you start to notice where it’s being spent.

None of this is unusual on its own. But layered together, can leave you with the uneasy sense that the ground beneath you isn’t quite as solid as it once was. And when all of that is happening at once, it doesn’t just feel unsettling. It starts to unsettle something deeper.

Perimenopause thins out the sense of who you are. The person you’ve spent your life becoming suddenly feels elusive, as if your default setting has been wiped. You spend so much energy reaching back for that old self, only to realise they aren’t there to meet you anymore. It is a dismantling of the identity you thought was permanent. When you lose those internal structures, and you’re simultaneously stripped of your usual external reference points, the question becomes impossible to ignore:

Who am I now?

It isn’t a question that lends itself to quick or tidy answers. But it matters.
Because in the space where that old identity used to be, something new, and much firmer, is starting to take up room.

Your capacity for people-pleasing begins to wear thin. The old ways of smoothing things over and keeping everyone happy just don’t seem available to you anymore. You’ve run out of the patience to perform them.

In their place, a directness begins to emerge, a clearer sense of your own “no.” You know what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.
It isn’t an easy shift to navigate, but it feels like a necessary kind of truth. I’ve done my time being palatable. So have so many of my clients. And what’s come through instead is something I recognise more easily as myself.

My creativity feels different, more free. My relationships feel deeper and more honest. I feel more joy. I feel wilder, more rooted. And there’s a growing sense that I don’t have to be everything to everyone in quite the same way.

It’s slower work. But it’s real. Even with the rollercoaster that perimenopause can be (some days I still feel like utter rubbish).

I fucking love this version of me.

If you are currently sitting in that waiting room (either literally at a doctor’s office or figuratively in your own life), I want you to know that the internal scaffolding can be rebuilt. You don’t have to navigate this dismantling alone.

I work with the ‘Covid Perimenopause Generation’ to find that firmer wilder version of themselves.

I have 6 coaching slots left for May. Let’s find out who you are now.