Hi, I’m Jen.
I’m a registered nurse, a mom, and the person who spent the better part of three years thinking she was quietly losing her mind.
It started around 41. I’d walk into a patient’s room mid-sentence and completely lose the thread. Not a blip. Something had changed. I was waking up at 3am drenched in sweat, staring at the ceiling until my alarm went off. My anxiety, which had been manageable my whole adult life, suddenly felt like a low-level hum of dread running underneath everything. And my weight started doing things that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was eating.
It followed me home too. I blanked completely on my kid’s teacher’s name in the school pickup line. Just stood there smiling and stalling while another parent waited for me to finish my sentence. That one rattled me more than the clinical stuff, honestly.
I’m a nurse. I know bodies. I’ve spent years helping other people figure out what’s wrong with theirs. And even I took over a year to connect the dots.
The thing nobody tells you: perimenopause can start a full decade before your last period. Most women have no idea. And when you go looking for information, what you find is either terrifying, aggressively vague, or written by someone trying to sell you a $200 adaptogen bundle with a pink ribbon on it.
I couldn’t find anyone just being straight with me about what was happening and what actually helped. So I did what nurses do. I went to the research. Read the studies. Experimented on myself in the most methodical, slightly obsessive way possible. My husband thought I was stress-spiraling. (He wasn’t entirely wrong, but he also wasn’t right.)
Things got better. Not overnight, and not from any single thing. But they got better.
This site is where I share what I found. I’m not your doctor, and not everything I tried will be right for you. But I am the nurse friend who read the actual studies and will translate them into plain English without making you feel like you’re either dying or being sold something.
Glad you found this place.