I Spent Ten Years Looking For A Woman Who Was Standing Right In Front Of Me

Mindset

For about a decade I was looking for someone. Me, specifically. An earlier edition. The one who could handle anything, who showed up, who did not fold. I kept trying to find my way back to her like she was a set of keys I had misplaced.

She was never behind me. That was the whole problem.

Being "the strong one" mostly means ignoring yourself at a professional level

I built my identity on being capable. Life came at me early and I learned to handle it. I was the person people called when things fell apart, and I was proud of that. Here is what nobody mentions about the job. You get very good at ignoring your own signals. Your body sends up flares for years and you walk right past them, because you have things to handle. I was tired. Not nap tired. Tired in a way sleep stopped touching. I gained weight that made no sense against what I was eating. My mood swung. I cried at things that did not warrant crying. Some days the brain fog was thick enough that I would lose a sentence halfway through saying it out loud.

So I did the responsible thing and went to the doctor. Repeatedly.

"Your labs look normal"

I heard that sentence enough times to have it engraved on something.

Your labs look normal. You are probably just stressed. Try sleeping more. Cut back on caffeine. Might be anxiety. You are getting older, this is how it goes. Not one of them said the word perimenopause. Not once. The hormonal shift that starts for plenty of women in their mid thirties, and produces almost exactly the list of symptoms I had just recited, walked into that exam room, waved at everybody, and left unmentioned. So I did what women do when the people paid to help us shrug. I decided the problem was me.

Broken. Weak. Running out of road.

Then it got worse

My marriage ended. One divorce gives you a voice in your head. Two or more gives that voice specifics. What is wrong with you. Why can you not get this right.

Not long after, I ended up in a relationship that was physically abusive.

I am not going to build a story out of the details. I will say it plainly, because someone reading this is sitting inside it right now. It happened to me. To the woman who called herself strong. Abuse does not seek out weak people. It finds people who are already worn down, whose tank is already empty, who have spent years handing everything they had to everyone else and have nothing left to defend with. There were nights I spent on the floor. Actual floor. Curled up, shaking. PTSD rewires how your nervous system reads safety, and it rewires how you read yourself. I had stretches where I could not locate myself at all.

I did try. I found yoga, poured myself into it, eventually taught it. It held for a while. Then life happened again and the thread slipped again, and I was back at the mirror not recognizing anybody in it.

I decided that was the rest of my life. Smaller. Quieter. Less.

A woman in her seventies destroyed my entire excuse collection

One night I was scrolling YouTube trying to turn my brain off, and a CrossFit video came up. I had no relationship with CrossFit. I assumed it was for twenty-five-year-olds who enjoy suffering.

I clicked anyway.

There was a woman who had to be seventy. Lifting. Moving with real power. Smiling. Apologizing to nobody. In the same video there was an adaptive athlete, a man with one leg, doing things I had quietly filed under physically impossible. I had two working legs and a filing cabinet of reasons. Too old. Too heavy. Too damaged. Too late. All of them became impossible to stand behind in about four minutes. One question stayed with me for weeks after.

When did I stop believing I could?

I walked in as the worst athlete in the building

First class, I was the oldest person there and the most out of shape. I did not know the words. I did not know the movements. I was scared.

I stayed anyway. That is the only part of this story that actually matters.

Then came months of bad days, modified everything, and crying in my car in the parking lot for reasons I could not always name. Then one day I did a strict pull-up. Later, I climbed a rope to the ceiling. I had decided women like me do not do things like that anymore. There is no such category. I invented it. You have invented a few of your own. Somewhere in there I also stopped fighting food and started using it. Thirty years of restricting, bingeing, punishing and rewarding, traded for actually fueling a body I had finally decided was worth feeding. That changed more than the training did.

The part I want you to take

I went looking for the woman I used to be and found one I had not met yet. Forged by the hard stuff. Stronger in the places that broke. Only possible because of the wreckage.

I stopped looking for her. I started becoming her.

You are not too old. Your body is under-supported and nobody has explained it to you, which is a very different situation from broken. And the confidence you think you lost is sitting there waiting for you to do one thing that proves the story wrong.

It does not have to be a pull-up.

Dr. Vickie Duncan, PhD, is the founder of Be Limitless, a functional nutrition and functional medicine practice for professional women in perimenopause and menopause. She’s a little sassy, sometimes funny, tracks everything and regrets nothing.

This is education, not medical advice or a diagnosis.