tease
- Hair & Beauty Rooms - 

On the surface I looked calm, was functioning, showing up, doing what needed to be done. But underneath, it was an entirely different matter. So, my skin began to show that in the only way it knew to do. React.

For when I was a young woman, without quite noticing it, I had been holding myself in a certain way. A quiet awareness of how I looked, how I was perceived, how I might be received in a room.

There was a period in my early fifties when I began to feel something I hadn’t experienced since I was a teenager. A kind of unsettledness. A quiet sense that something inside me had shifted slightly off centre. A tilt off my axis.

And there they were. The tiniest vertical lines around my mouth, soft but unmistakable - like little visitors who’d quietly settled in without bothering to knock.

For a long time, I didn’t think perimenopause had really touched me. Menopause, on the other hand, arrived all at once like a violent storm. But with hindsight, I could see how “peri” had quietly been moving through my body for years.

I didn’t injure my arm doing anything impressive. No gym accident, no heroic mishap, nothing dramatic or worth retelling at a dinner party as once upon a decade ago it may have been. I injured myself carrying three bottles of Gin.