Where Did I Go? Losing (and Finding) Yourself Before and During Menopause
- Tracey Langrill
- Jul 16
- 7 min read
It can creep in gradually or arrive without warning. One day you’re holding everything together – work, family, daily life - and the next, something feels off. You can’t think straight. You’re more irritable. Small tasks feel overwhelming. You catch your reflection and wonder who’s looking back at you. You're feeling lost? You feel your losing yourself in menopause...
At first, it might not even cross your mind that hormones are involved. You put it down to stress, poor sleep or just getting older. But underneath it all, something is shifting. You start to feel disconnected from the person you used to be. Something in you begins to ask: where did I go?
It’s Not Just Hormones, But They Do Matter
The changes in this stage of life go far beyond hot flushes or missed periods. Fluctuating oestrogen and progesterone can affect how your brain functions, how you regulate emotion and how you respond to stress. You might feel more anxious or flat, more sensitive or numb. Brain fog, disrupted sleep, mood swings and memory lapses are all common, and often quietly distressing.
And menopause rarely arrives in isolation - it lands in the middle of everything else; the pressures, the expectations, the constant mental to-do list. Often, this isn’t just a hormonal shift. It’s a collision of multiple life demands, all arriving at once.
The Burden That Builds Over Time
For many women, this is the stage where invisible loads become impossible to ignore. You might be balancing a demanding job, managing a household, keeping on top of family logistics, supporting teenagers, or caring for ageing parents. Sometimes it's all of that, at the same time.
You might be the person who remembers birthdays, checks in on friends, shops for elderly relatives, or takes charge of everyone’s emotional wellbeing. You’re the one who keeps things ticking over, who anticipates what others need before they ask, who doesn’t drop the ball (because you know what happens if you do).
However, there comes a point where even the most capable person can’t keep carrying that weight without feeling it, especially when your body and brain aren’t cooperating like they used to, especially when the emotional cost is finally catching up.
This is the part no one prepares you for – that menopause doesn’t just make you tired. It makes you feel done. And sometimes, it reveals just how much of yourself you’ve put on hold for everyone else.
Losing myself in menopause:
When I Don't Feel Like 'Myself'
It’s hard to explain to other people, or maybe even to yourself. You’re not ill, not depressed exactly, but you don’t feel like you. You’re still doing the things, but something feels muted. Detached. Blunted.
Many women describe feeling invisible. Not just in how others treat them, but in how they experience themselves. Interests fade. Confidence dips. The clarity that once came so easily is gone, replaced by hesitation and a kind of emotional static.
Familiar?
What do I actually want now?
Why do I feel so short-tempered?
Where has this anxiety come from?
How long have I been this tired?
Is this it?
Losing and Loosening
This phase often brings a quiet kind of grief. You may be letting go of roles you’ve carried for decades, such as the caregiver, the organiser, the one who always copes. You might no longer want to say yes to everything, but feel unsure what 'no' looks like.
There’s often guilt in that, and confusion too, specially if you’ve spent your life being capable and holding things together. When that identity starts to shift, it can feel like something is breaking. But sometimes, what’s breaking is a version of you that was built to survive, not to thrive.
And here’s the harder part: the world often expects you to carry on as before. To keep performing, producing, giving, smoothing. But your body might be asking you to rest. Your mind might be asking for quiet. Your deeper self might be asking: when is it my turn?
It’s Not Just Menopause – And It’s Not Just You
What you're feeling might be driven by hormonal changes. It might also be burnout. Or the weight of years spent pushing through. It might be grief, which is not always loud or obvious, but woven through everything. Sometimes it’s unresolved trauma, stirred up now that there’s less noise to drown it out.
More often than not, it’s a combination of things. That’s what makes it hard to pin down, and why it can be so difficult to talk about without being dismissed.
This isn’t about being weak or failing to cope. It’s about reaching the point where you can no longer ignore yourself.
It's Not the End: A Beginning of Sorts
It’s easy to focus on what’s falling away – the energy, the roles, the clarity you once had. But something else often begins to stir. A quiet refusal. A sense that you can’t keep living in a way that costs you your peace. That something needs to change, even if you don’t know what yet.
This isn’t about reinvention or transformation. It’s about honesty. Letting go of roles you’ve outgrown. Meeting yourself without the filters.
You don’t need a five-year plan or a new life purpose. You just need space to notice, to feel, to ask new questions.
Coming Back to Yourself
Losing yourself doesn’t mean you’re gone. It means you’ve become harder to reach, even to yourself. You may have spent years tending to other people’s needs while quietly tuning out your own. You’ve adapted, minimized, pushed through. The voice that once told you what mattered might have faded beneath all the roles you’ve had to play.
But midlife can act like a kind of clearing. What’s no longer working becomes harder to ignore. The patterns you’ve leaned on stop making sense. You stop making sense to yourself.
Coming back isn’t a neat process. It doesn’t arrive all at once. Sometimes it starts with something small – saying no to a request you’d usually agree to, and noticing how uncomfortable that feels. Taking time for something you used to love, and realising it no longer fits. Catching yourself mid-sentence and thinking, Why am I even saying this? Even forgetting what you're saying in mid-sentence... (a particular personal 'favourite' of mine).
Other times, it looks like nothing much on the outside – just sitting still and admitting that you’re lost. That you’re tired. That you don’t know what comes next.
What Coming Back Can Involve
Grief. Not just for what’s changed physically or emotionally, but for all the time you spent performing a version of yourself that no longer fits. For the years you gave away without realising.
Anger. At how much was expected of you. At how invisible your needs became. At the ways you were taught to shrink or smooth things over, even when it hurt.
Fear. Because becoming more yourself often means disappointing people. You might start noticing how much of your life was built around keeping the peace, or holding everything together.
Hope. Because somewhere under all the fog, there is still a sense of who you are. Maybe not fully formed, but waiting. Still present.
What It Might Look Like in Practice
Coming back to yourself doesn’t mean quitting your life or overhauling everything. It might mean:
Making decisions based on what you want, not what keeps things easiest
Being more direct – even when it feels awkward
Feeling your feelings before trying to fix them
Saying “I’m not available for that” without offering an excuse
Letting go of things you used to force yourself to care about
Spending less energy being “likeable” and more energy being honest
Some days, it might just mean doing a bit less. Leaving a few things undone. Giving yourself the benefit of the doubt. And no, this doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you whole.
This Is a Process – Not a Project
One of the hardest things to accept is that there’s no neat end point to this. No final version of “you” waiting to be discovered and perfected. The goal isn’t to get it all sorted. It’s to feel more like you, more often, with less effort.
You won’t always know what you need. You won’t always have the energy to try. Some days you’ll slip back into old patterns because they’re familiar and easy. That’s not failure, it’s part of it. What matters is noticing, gently, and starting again. Because coming back to yourself isn’t about being consistent. It’s about being in contact; with your limits, your body, your wants. Even your confusion.
If You’re Not Sure Where to Start...
Then you’re exactly where many women are at this point. Somewhere in the in-between; not who you were, not quite who you’re becoming. You don’t need answers to begin. Just honesty.
You can start by noticing what drains you. What soothes you. Who makes you feel good. Who you shrink around. What you’ve been pretending is fine.
Coming back to yourself often starts quietly; not with a decision, but with a feeling, perhaps the sense that your life is no longer quite your own and the growing belief that maybe, just maybe, it could be.
A Quiet Space to Be Real
If you’ve come this far, maybe some of this has hit home for you. Maybe you’ve been feeling the fog, the shift, the weight of it all. Maybe you’ve already begun asking, what now? You don’t need to be in crisis to want something to change. Sometimes, it’s enough to know you can’t keep doing things the way you’ve always done them.
Therapy can offer a space to explore all that. Not to fix or judge, but to hold what’s too heavy to carry alone. Sometimes it’s just about being heard, without having to explain everything. It's a space that’s yours.
If that kind of notion sounds like something you’d find helpful, I offer counselling in Exeter, Crediton and online for women navigating midlife and everything it brings. Quiet, steady, and tailored to you.
You’re Still Here
This stage can feel like losing yourself. But it can also be a slow return. Not to who you were, but to someone more rooted. Someone more honest. Someone still becoming.
You’re still here. Still worth listening to.
Still you.
