I was thirty-six, sitting on the paper that crinkles every time you breathe, the first time I tried to explain to my doctor that I could not find words anymore.

I want you to notice how that sentence sounds. I have read it back a hundred times since. It sounds like nothing. It sounds like being tired.

What I meant was that four days earlier I had stood in my own kitchen holding my grandmother’s skillet and could not retrieve the word skillet, and had stood there long enough that my daughter asked if I was okay. What I meant was that I had started writing down the names of people I had worked with for six years, in a note on my phone, before meetings. What I meant was that I had lost the thread of my own sentence out loud in front of eleven people, and had to say “sorry, I’ve lost it,” and everyone laughed kindly, and I went out to my car afterward and sat in it for a while before I drove anywhere.

What I said was: I think I’m having trouble focusing.

She asked if I was under a lot of stress.

I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was thirty-six with a mortgage, an eight-year-old, and a mother whose memory was going in a way that frightened me considerably more than my own. Yes. I was under a lot of stress. Naming the stress did not explain the skillet.

I left that appointment with a prescription for an antidepressant and a printout about sleep hygiene.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this story usually gets told. The antidepressant helped. It is still helping. I am not sorry I took it and I did not stop taking it.

I want to be clear that I’ve never avoided care either, because that is the part people assume. I had the same primary care doctor for nine years. I went. I answered the intake questions honestly every time. Whatever went wrong here, it was not that I did not show up.

And I mentioned the other things. I have spent years wondering whether I said them clearly enough. I told her my cycle had gone from twenty-eight days to twenty-four, then to thirty-five, then to nothing for two months, and then back. I told her I was waking at three in the morning, wide awake, four nights a week. I told her I was sweating through my shirt in a sixty-eight-degree office.

She said cycles change as you get older. She said sleep gets harder for everyone. She said we could check my thyroid, and we did, and it was fine.

The one time I got close, I asked whether any of it could be hormones, because I did not have a better word for it, and hormones was the only one I had. She said I was too young for any kind of menopausal symptoms. She said it the way you say something obvious, in the same breath as reaching for the door handle, and we moved on.

There is something else about those appointments I did not have language for until much later. She barely looked up.

I do not mean she was cold. I mean that I would say a sentence I had rehearsed in the parking lot, and hear typing. I described things she could have seen on my face from two feet away. In three years of raising it, she never once asked me a follow-up question about the words. Not what kind of words. Not how often. Not whether it was getting worse. That is the question I have never gotten over, because it is the one I was there to be asked.

I want to be precise about the count, because the count is the thing. It was three years between the first time I could not find a word and the first time anyone said the word perimenopause to me. All three of those years are in my chart.

What is in that chart is anxiety and weight management in her handwriting, three years running. What is not in that chart is the skillet. What is not in that chart is the sweating, or the three a.m., or the two months without a period, because I said all of those out loud in that room and none of them got written down.

I found the answer myself, at two in the morning, on my phone while doomscrolling instead of sleeping.

It was a list. Just a list, on a site whose name I could not tell you now. I was half looking with one eye open. Cycles that shorten, then lengthen, then skip. Waking at three and staying awake. Night sweats. Anxiety that arrives without a subject. Brain fog. Trouble with short-term memory and concentration.

Perimenopause.

I was thirty-nine by then. Higher up the page it said that it can begin in your late thirties or early forties. At thirty-six I had been early for it. Early is not the same as impossible, and nobody ever checked.

Not one person had ever asked this question.

It took nine more months to get someone to sit with me and talk it through. My PCP said there was nothing that could be done and she didn’t have training on it. I had to try and find a doctor that did.

I am still in it. I still lose words. But I know what I’m experiencing is real. I know that there are other women around me experiencing the same thing.

I would have wanted someone to tell me what was coming and what to expect.

I think about those three years. Mainly I think about all the time I lost trying to find an answer. Trying to find comfort. Trying to find validation. Most importantly I think about how I can share more about my experience to give validation and a safe space to the next woman.