Nobody warns you. If you’re lucky, your mom hands you a training bra, talks vaguely about “becoming a woman,” and then leaves you to figure out the rest solo. Or, if you’re like me, you’re sitting in Mrs. Steele’s 6th grade English class wearing white floral shorts when your “womanhood” makes a surprise arrival, and you’re completely unprepared.
My mother had a hysterectomy when I was five, so she never had that talk with me, and kept nothing in the house except some random old pantyliners. I knew what it was, but instead of feeling excited about the newest stage of my life, I enlisted my best friend Quiana’s help to hide it as best I could, until my dad left on a fishing trip. I didn’t want even the remote possibility of him hearing, so I waited until he was out of the city entirely.
Then I sat on the couch crying to my less-than-empathetic mother and said, “You know that thing that happens to girls? It happened.”
Her response: “What are you crying for? It happens to all of us. It’s no big deal.”
It’s no big deal. My introduction to womanhood.
Nobody sat me down with a chart. Nobody told me what was coming next, or the three stages after that. So consider this your field guide. Four stages. One extremely unstable butterfly. You will metamorphose through all of them, whether you signed up for it or not. Some of you are currently thrashing around inside the chrysalis part with 34 unrelated symptoms, ready to choose violence on the next person you hear chewing too loudly.
Larva: Puberty
This is you at 13.
Freshly hatched and feral. Slams doors like a grown man. Cried because her fries touched the ketchup. Swears she is soulmates with a boy she met yesterday during second period. Has planned her own funeral over one pimple. Still insists she doesn’t need deodorant, despite all available evidence.
She’s not a butterfly yet. She’s not even trying to be. She is a caterpillar eating everything in sight: snacks, attention, your last nerve, and turning it all into raw, chaotic feeling. Emotionally, she is held together by too much eyeliner and bad decisions. She will not listen to you because she is smarter, wiser, and somehow incapable of remembering to take out the trash. She will not explain why she’s crying.
Chrysalis: Perimenopause
This is you at 45.
Walked into the kitchen. Forgot why. Hasn’t slept through the night since Obama was president. Owns six fans and still says “why am I sweating, it’s 68 degrees in here.” Can smell your perfume from three zip codes away. Will absolutely consider violence over the sound of chewing, and has plotted serious crime over the sound of snoring. This is the part nobody photographs for a reason. Inside a real chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t gently sprout wings. It basically dissolves into goo first. That’s her. She remembers, in vivid detail, every embarrassing thing she’s done since 1989, replayed nightly, uninvited, at 3am. She does not remember your name. She has changed the thermostat four times today and will ask, with total sincerity, who keeps touching the thermostat. She thought it was ADHD. Then burnout. Then anxiety. Then possibly a brain tumor. Today it’s just heartburn, because she ate too late last night. Tomorrow it’ll be a completely different theory.
A word about Perimenopause herself:
She wasn’t invited. She changed your thermostat, moved your reading glasses, canceled your sleep subscription, and turned your memory into a loading screen. She made your bra itchy and started a hot flash in the middle of a work meeting, for fun. Now she’s standing in your kitchen wondering why she walked in there. She’ll be staying for 4 to 10 years. In that time, she’ll rearrange all of your furniture, tell you your décor is ugly, and gaslight you endlessly.
Emergence: Menopause
This is you at 52.
The periods finally stopped. So did pretending to like people. The chrysalis has cracked open. Perimenopause has moved out (she still keeps a fan on her at all times, out of habit, like an old war wound), but she has officially run out of people to impress.She refuses to wear an uncomfortable bra ever again, on principle. She has become allergic to everyone’s nonsense, and her doctor says this is, medically, completely normal. She carries hot sauce in her bag because she refuses to eat crappy food or lie about liking it.
Full Flight: Postmenopause
This is you at 65.
Fully winged. Fully done. Has mastered the phrase “no.” No explanation follows. Doesn’t chase people, doesn’t chase trends, doesn’t chase anything unless it’s the dog. Drinks her coffee black. Leaves group chats on purpose, no warning, no goodbye message. Her boundaries are so healthy people mistake them for hostility. They are not hostility. They are just a woman who ate everything in sight as a caterpillar, dissolved into goo for a decade, and came out the other side with wings and zero patience for under-seasoned chicken. She is basically immortal now, and she will not be discussing it further.
Here’s the thing about laughing at this timeline: the joke only works because it’s true. You read the version of you at 45 and thought of your mother, your sister, yourself six months ago crying at a Costco rotisserie chicken for no reason you could name.
And that’s exactly the problem. Perimenopause has something like 34 recognized symptoms, and it shows up right in the middle of everything else life is already throwing at you: aging parents, grief, an empty nest, a job that’s changing, your own mental health doing whatever it’s doing. So good luck figuring out what’s actually causing what. Is it the hormones, or is it just… your entire life happening at once?
Nobody hands you a way to sort that out. So many of us spend years thinking we’re depressed, or burnt out, or losing our minds, when really, we’re just goo. We’re just mid-metamorphosis with nobody telling us that’s what’s happening. And everyone, including ourselves, oftentimes, still expects us to keep acting and performing like we did at 25. Nobody hands you a field guide that says “rage-crying at a dog food commercial” is a hormone doing its job, not a personality collapse. So we self-diagnose with everything except the actual answer.
Nobody sat me down and explained any of this either, not the first stage, not the ones after it.
So if no one’s told you yet: you’re not falling apart. you’re not crazy, and it’s not “no big deal.”
You’re just building wings.