“I used to juggle everything.”
Every woman says it to me almost the same way. Not as a complaint. As a kind of quiet disbelief.
She used to run the school pickups, the meal plan, the birthday parties, the work deadlines, the ageing parent’s medical appointments — all of it, in the same week, without dropping a single plate.
She was the one everyone else leaned on. The one who remembered. Now she’s standing in the kitchen trying to remember the word for the thing you strain pasta in, and she can’t get there. She laughs it off in front of people. In the car, on her own, it terrifies her a little. Is this the start of something?
She’s not falling apart.
But she can feel herself further from herself than she’s ever been, and nobody around her has noticed yet — because she’s still doing it all. She’s just doing it on fumes, and paying for it in ways only she can see: the 4am wake-up she can’t explain, the bloating that turns up no matter what she eats, the two kilos that have become eight and won’t shift, the afternoon where her brain just stops working and she has to reread the same email three times.
The identity question underneath it all
Here’s what I don’t think gets said enough: the hardest part isn’t the symptoms.
It’s what the symptoms are quietly asking her — who am I now, if I’m not the one who holds it all together?
That question is disorienting in a way tiredness alone never is. She’s spent twenty, thirty years being capable. Being the reliable one. And somewhere in the last year or two, capable started to cost more than it used to.
She didn’t change her diet. She didn’t stop exercising. If anything she’s trying harder than ever — more sleep hygiene, more supplements, more willpower. And still, some mornings, getting through the day in one piece feels like the whole achievement.
Let me be straight with you: what’s happening has a physical cause. Trying harder isn’t going to fix it — finding the cause is.
You know what — I’ve felt this too. I struggled, and I didn’t realise at the time what was actually going on. For most of my working life I was the income earner and the principal provider. I held it together — for my family, my ageing parents, my extended family — and I did it well. Then there was a stretch where I stopped coping and couldn’t work out why. I blamed a relationship under strain. Then I blamed my own health. Both were part of it, but neither was the real answer. I was moving through perimenopause, and it was changing the ground under me.
What’s actually changing
Your body in your late 30s, 40s and 50s is not the same machine it was at 25 — not worse, just running on a different set of rules. The systems that used to absorb the load without complaint — your nervous system, your blood sugar regulation, your digestion, your hormonal signalling — are more sensitive to strain than they used to be, and less forgiving when you push past what they can buffer.
That’s why the same pace that used to be sustainable now leaves you flattened by 3pm.
Why the word-finding slips happen under load and vanish when you’re rested.
Why your gut reacts to foods it used to handle without a second thought.
None of that is decline for the sake of decline. It’s your body telling you, specifically and physiologically, that the old strategy has an expiry date — and it’s already passed.
The women who turn this around aren’t the ones who push harder. They’re the ones who finally get taken seriously enough to find out which systems are under strain, and in what order to support them — because randomly adding magnesium and hoping isn’t the same as knowing.
Where to start…
You don’t need to overhaul your entire life this week. You need an accurate map of what’s actually going on in your body — because right now you’re guessing, and you’ve been guessing for a while.
That map isn’t something you can build from a blog post or a search engine.
It comes from sitting down with someone who can look at your whole picture — your gut, your hormones, your nervous system, your history — and work out what’s actually driving this for you.
If you’re ready for that conversation, book an appointment and let’s find out what’s really going on.
Warmly,
Teressa,
Naturopath | Clinical Nutritionist | Biochemist
