Perimenopause, Fascism, and Other Reasons We’re Not Sleeping
Emma and Nuala try to figure out if they’re perimenopausal, wonder if it’s anxiety or the end of the American empire, and designate Tori Amos as their menopause cult leader.
Life
Perimenopause, Fascism, and Other Reasons We’re Not Sleeping
Emma and Nuala try to figure out if they’re perimenopausal, wonder if it’s anxiety or the end of the American empire, and designate Tori Amos as their menopause cult leader.
In Casey Rand’s deeply resonant McSweeney’s piece Is It Perimenopause or the Death Knell of Late-Stage Capitalism?, she asks critical questions about hormones and the state of the world: “Am I depressed because my periods are ending, or did my boss use my emails to train my AI replacement and then fire me with no severance the day before I was supposed to have spleen surgery?”
Truly, who among us, right? In this bizarre moment in history, it’s genuinely difficult to parse hormone-fueled anxiety from a legitimate fear of your neighbors being seized by masked federal agents in the middle of the night.
To make matters worse, Western medicine infrastructure — which up until 1993 excluded women from the vast majority of clinical trials — has proven almost entirely useless in our quest for diagnoses. [Editor’s note: And until now, the word "perimenopause" wasn't recognized as a word by my computer's spell check function.]
As the senior citizens of COYOTE (AKA the over-40 contingent), we have found ourselves kvetching about various symptoms and sleep issues more times than we can count. In the spirit of normalizing these experiences, here is a frank conversation in which we attempt to unpack what is happening to our bodies while capitalism beats us over the head with Instagram ads.