Transcript of Menopause Didn’t Make Me Crazy. It Exposed What I Was Already Carrying. Solo Episode with Lisa Lacy

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the edge.

Menopause didn't make me crazy. It exposed what I was already carrying.

This episode includes discussions of depression, suicidal ideation, trauma, addiction, medical trauma, and mental health diagnoses. This is my lived experience. This is not medical advice.

There is a particular kind of terror that comes with waking up one day and realizing you do not recognize yourself. Not your body, your emotions, the way your brain works, the way you react to people you love, the way you sleep and think.

You don't even recognize the sound of your own thoughts.

And when you are a woman in midlife, there is a pretty decent chance somebody will look at all that and say, well, you're just going through menopause.

Just— I would like to have a conversation about the word just.

Because menopause does not feel like just anything to me.

It feels like somebody walked into the control room of my brain, flipped half the breakers off, turned the fire alarm on, and then handed me a pamphlet about hot flashes.

And here's the part we do not talk about enough.

Menopause didn't make me crazy. It exposed everything I had spent a lifetime learning how to carry: the trauma, hypervigilance, attachment wounds, addiction, grief, rage, fear, the need to perform and achieve. The desire to control enough variables around me that I could convince myself I was finally safe.

And when my hormones changed, a whole lot of the machinery I had unknowingly been using to keep that system operational changed with them.

Suddenly Survival strategies that had worked for decades stopped working, and I didn't know what the hell was happening.

Welcome to Notes from the Edge. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, and today we're talking about menopause, trauma, mental health, and what happens when a body that has survived decades of shit suddenly loses some of the scaffolding that had helped hold it all together. And yes, that is a scientific terminology. Decades of shit. Write that down.

Now, I've been called crazy before. The reason this subject matters so deeply to me is because menopause was not the first time I had been afraid of my own mind.

I have lived under a lot of labels, a lot of disordered— borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, alcohol use disorder, codependency, trauma bonding, complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

And for years, those diagnoses became part of the story I told myself about who I was.

Something was definitely wrong with me. I was defective and disordered, too much, unstable, difficult, broken, psychotic, needing to be controlled. But meanwhile, now I could run a business or businesses. I could lead people. I spent almost 3 decades in corporate education, and I built a company that served more than thousands of facilities.

I could walk into a boardroom and handle stuff most people would have needed 3 Xanaxes and a hostage negotiator to get through. I could perform competence at an extraordinarily high level and then go home and emotionally unravel.

You see, that contradiction confuses people. We think dysfunction always looks dysfunctional. We think traumatized people are are incapable and depressed people cannot be productive. So somebody who is running a company, raising families— I did raise a few— achieving things, speaking intelligently, and taking care of everybody else, well, she must be okay.

No.

Some of us become extraordinarily competent because being competent is how we survive.

My nervous system learned a long time ago, when I was very, very young— my violation story started at 4 years old— stay alert, read the room, know what everybody is feeling, anticipate danger, fix the problem, perform, achieve, don't need too much, but don't stop moving long enough to feel anything that's underneath all of that.

That can look an awful lot like success until the machinery starts breaking down.

Then came surgical menopause. A few years ago, I had a hysterectomy, and unexpectedly, my ovaries were removed too.

I was still fairly young. That distinction matters because I didn't gradually stroll into menopause. My body got thrown through a door, and it felt like a glass door. One day my ovaries were producing hormones, then the next day they weren't. And suddenly I was living in a body whose chemistry had fundamentally changed top to bottom.

I want all of us to understand how profound that can be.

Because what followed wasn't simply, oh, look, I'm hot today.

I experienced painful neuropathy that felt like electrical shocks that were closely related to what it feels like to have my pulmonary embolisms that are a side effect of my congenital blood disease. I experienced joint pain, insomnia, fatigue, a lot of weight gain very quickly, loss of libido, panic, depression, rage that scared even me. Brain fog like crazy, a sense that my body had betrayed me and I no longer recognized myself.

And one of the most disturbing pieces was the emotional volatility because I had finally, up until that point, found some mental stability.

There were moments when my reactions felt disproportionate to me.

I could intellectually understand what was happening in a situation and still feel like my body had declared DEFCON 1. That is terrifying when you already have a psychiatric history because your first thought isn't necessarily, oh, my hormonal environment has dramatically changed. Your first thought is, "Oh my God, it's happening again. I'm losing my mind." And when you spent years carrying diagnoses that told you your emotions were evidence of pathology, you become very good at distrusting yourself.

Every intense emotion becomes evidence for prosecution. See? 'You're unstable. You're too emotional. This is why people can't deal with you.' And that creates another layer of panic on top of the original panic.

You're not only having the emotional experience, you're terrified of what the emotional experience supposedly means about you.

And unfortunately, hormones weren't an easy fix for me.

This is where my story becomes even more complicated. I have hereditary antithrombin III deficiency, a congenital blood clotting disorder. I've had many pulmonary emboli. I've had chronic blood clots. I've been hospitalized over and over.

Most recently, earlier this year, I was dealing with another cluster of pulmonary emboli along with a likely diagnosis of lupus pancreatitis.

There have been moments in the last year when mortality has not been an abstract concept for me.

It has been sitting in the room right with me.

Because of my clotting history, systemic hormone therapy isn't a simple option for me.

Now that's my individual medical situation. It's not a statement about whether another woman should or shouldn't do hormone therapy.

Those decisions belong between a woman and qualified clinicians who understand her complete medical history.

But for me, the reality was brutal.

I was experiencing significant surgical menopause symptoms while also navigating a body in which certain treatment options carried serious concerns. Now imagine the psychological experience. Your body changes, your mind changes, you're exhausted, scared, hurting, sleep is gone, libido's gone, all relationships are affected, you're gaining weight, your joints hurt, your nervous system feels like it's plugged directly into an electrical socket, and you're supposed to just wing it, according to what one of my doctors told me. Keep working like normal, being a wife, a mother, making decisions. Definitely be productive.

Answer all those emails. Keep smiling and say you're fine when somebody asks you how you are. And God forbid, don't get angry. Because angry midlife women are still treated like a cultural punchline. Oh, she's hormonal or menopausal difficult.

She's crazy.

No. Sometimes she is a human being whose entire biological environment changed while everyone around her continued expecting the exact same person to show up.

Trauma doesn't magically disappear because you turn a certain number.

This is the piece I'm becoming obsessed with. We talk about trauma, we talk about menopause, but we don't nearly enough talk about what happens when they collide. Because I didn't arrive at menopause with a blank nervous system. None of us do. I came into it carrying a lifetime.

I was born in New Orleans and raised in Louisiana. By 13, my life had already taught me that safety could disappear quickly. I knew instability, fear. I knew what it was like to move around and have life change underneath me in an instant. Then my adult life added its own chapters: chaotic marriages, domestic violence, jail, psych wards, addiction, rehab, recovery.

Relationships that activated every attachment wound I had.

Years of trying to understand why I could be so competent in one part of my life and so completely messy and terrified in another.

Then at 40, I went into a dual diagnosis treatment center I got sober. I lived in AA for a while, 6 days a week for years, worked the steps many times, started rebuilding my life.

And recovery gave me tools I never had before. But recovery does not erase your body's history. It just gives you a different relationship with it. So when menopause arrived, it didn't create a brand new me.

It found every place the old me had learned to survive. It turned the volume up. That's what I mean when I say menopause didn't make me crazy. It exposed what I was already carrying.

Maybe some of what we call symptoms are actually intersections.

That is where I want the conversation to become more nuanced because women's mental health gets compartmentalized. You go to one person for hormones, one person for psychiatry, another for trauma, another for sleep, another for chronic pain, another for your blood work, another for your marriage. And somehow the woman herself is expected to be the project manager connecting all these systems all alone.

What if the question isn't, is this menopause or trauma? What if it's both?

What if poor sleep makes emotional regulation harder? And chronic pain, it definitely makes resilience harder.

And a suddenly altered hormonal environment interacts with an already sensitized body And then add vitamin deficiencies, medications, illness, grief, relationship stress, trauma history, menopause, and identity disruption all happening in the same human being because they are inside me now. It's happening now.

Human beings do not experience themselves in billing codes. The body doesn't say hang on, this emotion belongs to gynecology. Please forward it to the appropriate department. We are systems. And sometimes the crisis happens at the intersection.

Even something as seemingly simple as discovering and treating my vitamin D deficiency became another piece of my own picture. It did not explain my entire life. It wasn't one magical answer, but it mattered.

And that's why I've become so passionate about women being evaluated as complete human beings instead of being handled a single explanation for a complicated experience. Because I'm going through the identity crisis that nobody warned me about. And that's another part of menopause I don't hear discussed enough— identity.

Who are you when the body you've known your entire life changes overnight? Or when sex changes on you? Or when your energy levels tank?

When you cannot work at the pace you used to? When your tolerance for bullshit suddenly drops through the floor? And actually That last one might be a feature. I'm keeping that one.

For women who have spent decades performing roles, menopause can create an enormous identity rupture. We were the good wife, mother, employee, executive, caretaker, daughter, friend, good little emotional shock absorber for everybody else's dysfunction. Then something happens. The body says, I'm not doing this anymore.

And suddenly, the woman everybody depended on starts asking very inconvenient questions.

Why the hell am I doing this? Why am I tolerating this? Why am I exhausted after spending time with this person? Why does everyone have access to me?

When did I stop being a person and become an infrastructure for everyone else? And perhaps the most frightening question of all: When did I disappear from my own life?

And I think that's why midlife can look disruptive from the outside. A woman starts changing relationships or leaving jobs, changing careers, marriages, starting new businesses, writing books, making art, telling the truth with boundaries, and everyone says, "What happened to her?" Maybe nothing happened to her. Maybe she happened to herself.

Maybe the version of her who could keep performing that life no longer exists because my body eventually forced the issue.

I left corporate life after almost 30 years in it, around the same time my body made it very clear that it was no longer interested in participating in my old definition of productivity. Pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots in your lungs, have a way of clarifying the calendar. See, they have to go through your heart to get there. So does being hospitalized. So does wondering if you're going to get a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance, a tenth chance.

For me, mortality lives in my bloodstream, so intention lives in everything I do now. This isn't a cute metaphor for me. It is literal. I have a blood disease that has tried to kill me so many times. I have spent periods unable to travel.

I have needed a cane. I have fallen. I've been on bed rest. I had to cancel things I desperately wanted to do because my body said, "Nope." And somewhere inside all of that, I started realizing how much of my identity had been built around being able to push through all of it. The exhaustion, pain, fear, chaos, grief, the toxic relationships.

Push through the bad day and tell everybody you're fine. Push through the illness. Push, push, push, push through the menopause until eventually Everything in me said the word no.

Here's the mental piece we cannot keep whispering about. I want to say something clearly because women's lives depend on us being able to have uncomfortable conversations around this. Menopause can intersect with serious depression.

And anxiety and suicidal ideation.

And if a woman tells you that she does not feel like herself, that she is frightened by her thoughts, that her depression has changed, that she cannot sleep, that she is experiencing rage or despair that feels foreign to her, please Don't reduce her to a joke about hormones.

Take that conversation seriously.

And women out there, please take yourselves seriously too.

You do not get an award for suffering until it becomes an emergency. I spent too many years believing that being strong meant enduring and I don't believe that anymore. Strength can look like saying, yo, something has changed and I need help. I want my hormones looked at. I want my medications reviewed.

I want my sleep taken seriously. I want all of my labs checked and I want somebody to understand my trauma history because that is the whole picture. And I certainly want to talk about my mental health without being dismissed. And if the first person you talk to doesn't listen, find another person. This isn't about self-diagnosing.

It's about refusing to disappear inside somebody else's 5-minute assessment of your entire life.

And I don't think I'm interested in getting back to normal or the old me.

But for like a year there, I did. I wanted to be back to who I was— my old body, my old energy, my old ability to work, the one who could carry an impossible amount of weight without anyone knowing she was struggling.

I don't want that job anymore.

That woman was extraordinary. She was tired. She survived, achieved, carried everybody, performed, and somewhere along the way she started believing her value was tied to how much she could withstand.

I turned 50 after getting out of the hospital earlier this year, and I think this chapter of my life is less about returning to who I was and more about meeting who I am without all the performance. And that can be uncomfortable because performance buys you certainty. People applaud it, they reward competence, they look at you when you're useful. But real authenticity asks a much harder and better question: who are you when you stop organizing yourself around everyone else's comfort. That is the question underneath this entire show, underneath my writing, all of my work.

And it is the question I keep finding at the center of every rabbit hole: what did you perform in order to survive?

For me, it was strength confidence, fearlessness, control, achievement. And I became very, very good at surviving, and I did.

Maybe the work in midlife isn't becoming better at survival.

I think now it's deciding that survival is not the same thing as really living.

Maybe I was never crazy.

There is a sentence I've been writing my way towards for years.

Maybe I was just inside survival.

I don't say that to erase psychiatric illness or dismiss diagnoses. I say it because I believe every symptom is trauma.

I also say it because context matters, biology matters, hormones matter, relationship matters, grief matters, addiction matters, sleep, illness, the body matters, and the story we tell a woman about herself matters.

Because if we get told for 30 years that every intense emotional experience is evidence that we are fundamentally defective, disordered, eventually we become afraid of our own humanity. And I was. I was afraid of being human, and I don't want to be anymore. Maybe some of my reactions were disproportionate. Maybe some of my coping mechanisms hurt me and others.

Maybe there were times I needed treatment. Maybe there were times I desperately needed accountability. All those things can be true. And also, there was always a reason There was always a nervous system trying to accomplish something. Protect me.

Keep me connected, safe, functioning, here and alive.

Understanding this does not remove responsibility, but it gives us somewhere intelligent to begin.

So if you are in menopause and you don't recognize yourself right now, if you're listening to this from the middle of it and thinking, what the hell happened to me?

I want you to become curious before you become cruel to yourself. Ask better questions. What changed? When? How are you sleeping?

What is happening in your relationship to yourself and others? What old wounds suddenly feel louder? What are you carrying, tolerating? What does your body want? What medical factors need to be explored?

And what are you grieving?

And maybe what are you too tired to perform now?

Because sometimes a breakdown is not one thing breaking.

Sometimes it is 20 years of adaptation becoming impossible to maintain. And sometimes the woman who emerges from that isn't the ruined version of who you were. She is the version who can no longer lie to herself.

I'm still getting to know myself. I'm 50, I'm menopausal, I'm sober, I'm scarred, I've got a congenital blood disease, I've survived pulmonary embolism, psych wards, addiction, domestic violence, grief, reinvention, and a life of being told who I was by other people, and occasionally I'm still a complete pain in the ass. I do feel obligated to maintain some continuity of character, but here I am increasingly trusting myself, not because I always get it right, but because I finally understand that an emotion is data, it's information, not a verdict. A symptom is something to be curious about and investigate, not an identity. A diagnosis can be useful without becoming your entire biography.

And menopause isn't the end of the story. It may be the chapter where the performance finally becomes too expensive.

And perhaps that's where something much more interesting begins.

I'm Lisa Lacey, and I'll leave you with the question I ask every guest who comes through here.

What did you perform in order to survive?

Maybe this is your season where you don't have to perform anymore.

When you find the answer, welcome to the edge.