When Joy Disappears

What perimenopause took from me, and what it gave back

The part where joy disappears.

Not because you have stopped caring. Not because your life is bad. Not because you are ungrateful or broken or doing something wrong. But because something deep in you is changing, and for a while it can feel as though the colour drains out of everything.

That is how the beginning of perimenopause felt for me.

It felt like the sudden disappearance of joy. The world went black and white. A dark cloud seemed to follow me wherever I went. Life, which had once felt alive and full of possibility, suddenly felt flat, heavy, and painfully far away. I remember thinking, this is it now. This is how life will feel for the rest of my days.

It was terrifying.

At the time, I described it as being submerged in muddy water. I could not see clearly. I could not find my way. And the more I tried to fix it, the more the mud stirred up and made everything worse.

Every attempt to get myself out of it seemed to push me deeper in.

It took me a while to understand that this was not a problem I could solve in the usual way. I could not think my way out of it. I could not force my way through it. I could not perform my way back into joy.

What helped, eventually, was the opposite.

I had to sit still.

I had to listen within.

I had to hermit, be alone, and stop trying to explain something I did not yet understand. It was pretty extreme. My family did not understand it, and to be honest, I could not explain it either. I only knew that I needed quiet. I needed space. I needed not to talk.

Looking back now, I can see that what I had really lost was hope.

And hope is life.

When hope disappears, everything feels darker than it is. Everything feels final. Everything feels as though it might stay that way forever. That was the hardest part for me. Not simply that I felt low, but that I truly believed this was how life would feel from now on.

And as is so often the case for women, life was not just asking me to navigate one thing.

Around that same time, my mum passed away. My children left home. My twenty-five year relationship began to fall apart. There was grief upon grief, layer upon layer, and it all seemed to arrive at once. So if you are reading this and recognising yourself in that kind of season, please know this: you are not weak, and you are not failing. Sometimes life really does crack open all at once.

And yet, as messy as that chapter was, and there were so many tears, it was also the beginning of something very beautiful.

It was the beginning of me coming home to myself.

It was a remembering of my soul.

It was a stepping into the power of my mother’s lineage.

It was an awakening of the feminine in me, which still makes me smile a little because I have always thought of myself as more of a tomboy.

I did not emerge from that chapter all at once. There was no grand breakthrough, no dramatic overnight transformation. It happened one degree at a time. One small shift. One honest step. One next decision without needing to know the ten after that.

Slowly, I started to trust the process.

I let go of the feeling that I was not enough, that I was behind, that everyone else had figured something out that I had somehow missed. I began to trust in divine timing. I began to trust that life was happening for me, not to me.

And that changed everything.

Not because it made life perfect, but because it changed the way I walked through it.

Today, I still do not have the kind of money story that the online world would probably prefer me to have. I cannot point to some polished version of success and say, there you go, proof that it all worked. But honestly, that is no longer the point for me.

It is not about the money anymore.

It is about recognising the gift I have to give to the world and beginning, fully, to use it.

It is about fulfilment.

It is about purpose.

It is about the unwavering belief that I am on the right path.

And this is why I work the way I do.

I often meet women right there in the muddy water. In the mess. In the grief. In the in-between. In that strange place where you feel somewhere and nowhere at the same time. Many of them are hesitant to begin there. They think they need to know where they are going before they ask for support. They think they need a plan, clarity, certainty, words.

But the beauty of our co-creation lies in beginning in the mud.

That is often the most powerful place to begin.

Many women do not turn their cameras on when we meet, and that is completely fine. I listen deeply, and for that I do not need to see you. You do not have to arrive polished. You do not have to have the answers. You do not have to explain yourself perfectly. You do not have to know exactly what comes next.

You only have to come as you are.

So if you are in that season right now, if life has gone black and white, if the joy has disappeared, if you feel submerged and cannot see your way forward, please hear me when I say this.

You are not alone.

This is part of the female experience for so many of us, even though not enough women speak about it openly.

And it is a phase.

A very real one. A very painful one at times. But still a phase.

There is life on the other side of it.

Not necessarily a return to who you were before, but something deeper and truer than that. A becoming. A remembering. A return to the woman underneath all the noise, all the roles, all the expectations, all the rushing.

And maybe even, eventually, a quiet gratitude for what this season revealed.

This is also why I created The Pivot.

Because so many women think they need clarity before they ask for support, when in truth the most honest and powerful place to begin is often right in the mud. In the not knowing. In the tenderness. In the quiet sense that something is ending and something else is trying to be born.

Inside The Pivot, we begin there. Gently. Without pressure. Without pretending. We listen for what is true now, and from there we take the next step.

If you are in the muddy water right now, please know I am here.

If this speaks to you, you can reply to this post or book a free call to explore whether The Pivot feels like the right place for your next chapter.