Nina Lorez Collins - What Would Virginia Woolf Do?: And Other Questions I Ask Myself as I Attempt to Age Without Apology

You need a cohort of peers to go through the aging process with you. A cackle of crones! A cavalry!

MARINA BENJAMIN, THE MIDDLEPAUSE: ON TURNING FIFTY

IN THE FALL OF THE YEAR I turned forty-six, I started experiencing night sweats and hot flashes. My periods had been erratic over the course of the previous year, so after a few weeks of worried confusion, I began to wonder if the symptoms might be the onset of perimenopause, the phase in a womans life I understood to precede menopause, but about which I knew little. A week or two later, I was waking up every night between three and five a.m. As someone who has been a lifelong excellent sleeper, this turn of events was deeply disconcerting. Naturally, I went straight to Google.

Efficiently directed to Healthline.com, I found sleeplessness among the many symptoms of perimenopause. On top of the sleep troubles, hot flashes, and night sweats, the site lists an alarming thirty-three additional symptoms, including feelings of dread, apprehension, and doom. Other winners are head and/or pubic hair loss, increase in facial hair, gastrointestinal distress, indigestion, flatulence, itchy skin, and nausea. The list goes on and on, each ailment more depressing than the next: mood swings, depression, thinning nails, anxiety, changes in body odor, lack of libido. Upon further investigation, I learned that the median length of time women endure symptoms is 7.4 years, and typically longer, if you are like me and the symptoms start before menstruation ceases. It appears likely, from what Ive read, that Ill be going through this change of life for about eleven years. Thats a long time to go from youngish to oldish, which, if were going to be brutally frank, is essentially what this phase is all about.

I had my kids early. I delivered my first child at twenty-four and my last at thirty. In New York City, where I live, this is fairly unusual. Because as women we make so many of our long-lasting friendships through our children, one thing it means is that practically all of my girlfriends are older than me, generally by a decade, so somewhere between fifty and sixty at this point. They had already gone through this! As I found myself sweaty, exhausted, and depressed in the fall of 2015, I was surprised that not a single one had warned me. Wasnt the emergence of back fat alone worth a conversation?

I soon realized the reason women dont talk openly about aging is pretty straightforward. Weve been raised in a world, indoctrinated into a whole value system, in which young equals good and old equals bad, and were embarrassed to admit that were crossing that line. Who wants to sit around moaning about hormonal decline? It makes us feel pathetic. Even worse, it makes us question our intrinsic worth. Of course, some lucky women dont experience menopausal or perimenopausal symptoms so dramatically. Some dont have any symptoms at all. But even those women, like all of the rest of us, deal with the larger issues. Namely, what does it mean and feel like to be older in an ageist societyespecially for females?

Any attempt to engage my children or husband in a conversation about my sleeplessness and other premenopausal woes was met with glazed-over stares of incomprehension and flat-out disinterest. No one wants to hear this stuff over the dinner table, and if youre not in it, you truly cannot, and do not, want to relate. Yet I felt an urgent need to talk.

So I created a group on Facebook and called it What Would Virginia Woolf Do? The official description of the group is: A closed, confidential forum for women over forty, with a bent toward the literary, witty, and feminist. A place to discuss, support, and share things we may not care to share with the men and children in our lives. From the start, the group grew exponentially from friends to friends of friends to strangers, everyone wanting to know they werent aloneor going crazy.

Going on three years later, what has emerged (exploded, actuallywere up to just under eight thousand members and growing) is a surprisingly candid, lively, and intimate extended conversation representing the range of interests of women in our cohort: educated, sophisticated, savvy, literary, and politically minded women who have strong opinions and a fierce sense of humor. We come from all over the country, even the world, and we talk about feminism, our bodies, health, fashion, politics, culture, men, and of course sex.