At the beginning of 2025, I spent three months inside the Menstruality Leadership Programme with Red School. It gave me language for something I’d been quietly feeling for a while.
For the past couple of years, I’d noticed changes. Not all the time, but enough to notice. My cycles shifting. Word searching mid-sentence. Emotional waves that felt bigger than usual. Poor skin. Unwanted hair. Little things, but they were adding up.
I did all the tests. I spoke to doctors. “You’re too young, just get more sleep, try to stress less.” But deep down, I knew something else was happening.
Then Red School gave it a name.
They call it The Quickening. The beginning of the menopause journey. Perimenopause. A sacred shift into the autumn years of our lives.
Naming it changed everything. Not because it solved it, but because it honoured it. The Quickening felt right. Not medical. Just a deep inner knowing, finally recognised.
Nobody gave us the numbers, either
Here’s what I worked out later, when I started looking at the maths of all this.
The Quickening (Perimenopause) can last anywhere from four to ten years (and probably more if we are really listening in). Menopause itself is one single day, the day that marks a year since your last bleed. And then you are postmenopausal for around thirty years. A third of your life. Possibly more.
So the thing I was told I was too young for is a transition that can run for a decade. And the thing everybody actually talks about lasts twenty four hours.
Around 90% of postmenopausal women say they were never taught anything about menopause at school. Not one lesson. Not one conversation.
No wonder we arrive here with no map and assume the problem is us.
Full transparency, these numbers are normally based on caucasian women, so if you are like me part of the global majority the way you may be experiencing this younger, for longer or in a completely different way.
The rest we never took
This summer I was at Medicine Festival, in a session with Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, and she talked about her own transition. Through The Quickening and into menopause.
She listened to her body. She rested. She took the time. And when rage came up, when things came up, she took them seriously instead of pushing them down.
It wasn’t without symptoms. She’s clear about that. But she flowed through it.
And what she said has stayed with me ever since. She believes so much of what surfaces in this time comes from the fact that we never rest. Not really.
Think about that for a second. From the time you started cycling to right now, how many bleeds have you actually rested through? How many autumns (luteal phase) did you slow down for? For most of us the answer is none, including me, the answer is very few if any at all.
So this isn’t just symptoms popping up. It’s decades of not resting, all arriving at once.
And I do believe that the hot flushes, the broken sleep, the rage, all of it could be softened by more rest. Not fixed necessarily. But softened.
The thing I ignored for years
Red School talk about how the truth-telling gets louder in The Quickening. Whatever your luteal phase has been quietly saying for years, this is the season where the volume goes up.
And goodness, I recognise that.
For years my intuition spoke to me in my luteal phase. Every single month. I wasn’t listening, because it didn’t feel like something to trust. It felt like being difficult. Or tired. Or a bit much.
So I ignored it. Cycle after cycle after cycle. Until it got loud enough that I finally had to stop and listen.
And it was only afterwards, looking back, that I could see it clearly. My luteal phase had been telling me exactly what I needed to do the whole time. For months. I just wasn’t connected enough to hear it.
That’s what The Quickening does. It stops letting you get away with not listening.
The story we were handed
Everything around us describes this time as a decline. A losing of something. A deterioration, Symptoms to manage, a body to fix, a woman who used to be one thing and is now somehow less of it.
That story came from somewhere. From the media. From our grandma’s, who mostly weren’t given anything better. From a world that finds a woman who is in the autumn of her fertile years difficult to place/manage.
And if something is making your life hard right now, if the sleep or the rage or the anxiety is taking you out, please get support you need. I would never talk around it. It’s real and it deserves care.
But the shifting itself was never the problem.
What changed in how I live
I track with intuition. I listen more closely. I rest without apology.
I plan my work around my energy instead of pretending it’s the same every week. I say no more. I take the rage week seriously instead of apologising for it. And when something surfaces in my autumn (luteal phase), I write it down now rather than telling myself I’m just tired.
It has shaped everything I share with you. Breath. Cyclical wisdom. Embodied practice. A more intentional and spacious way of being.
And on Friday 18 September, I go deeper
This week I start my Menstruality Apprenticeship with Red School.
It’s the deepest training I’ve done in this work, and it means I’ll be spending the next stretch of time right inside the thing I’m living through. Which feels like a strange and rather perfect bit of timing.
So there will be more of this. More writing, more practice, more language for the parts of this that most of us have been navigating in the dark. I’ll bring it to you as it comes.
If something’s shifting
If you’re 35+ and something is changing, in your body, your energy, your rhythm, you might be feeling it too.
This is the beginning of a new rhythm. A new season of your life. And it deserves to be met with curiosity rather than fear.
Have you noticed shifts in your body, your energy, your rhythm? I’d really love to know where you’re at.
And if you’re not sure where to start, start small. The Breath & Cycle Check-In is a ten minute guided breath practice and a monthly calendar, so you can begin noticing what your own cycle is actually doing. It’s £7, and it’s the smallest possible way in.
NB: The Quickening, and the inner seasons framework I work with, both come from Red School. If this speaks to you, their work is worth your time.