Is menopause affecting my self-esteem?

Body image

A Saturday morning, a fitting room, the overhead light that forgives nothing. You took the same size as usual and it no longer hangs the same way. It's not that it doesn't do up, it's that it tells a different story from the one it used to tell. You stay three seconds too long in front of the mirror, and during those three seconds something very quick happens: you are not looking at the garment, you are taking inventory. The stomach, the arms, the line of the neck. You come out saying to the sales assistant that it wasn't what you were looking for, which is true in a certain way. Out in the street, your mood has dropped a notch and you would be hard pressed to say exactly when. You have a coffee, you watch people go by, and you catch yourself doing the same thing with the women around you: what age, how does it hang. It is not a pleasant thought, and it is there all the same.

To try: Next time that moment comes, do not try to think well of yourself — that is one more demand, and it fails. Simply note what you were comparing yourself to. If the answer is "to myself ten years ago", you have hold of the real problem: it is not your body that is at issue, it is a point of comparison that guarantees a permanent shortfall and that, unlike your body, can be changed.

Identity and femininity

A Wednesday evening, you are tidying things away and you come across a box of old photographs. There is one where you are thirty-five, on a terrace, someone is making you laugh. You look at it for a long time — not with nostalgia exactly, more with a strange kind of curiosity, as if you were looking at someone you know very well but no longer see. You look for what has shifted and you cannot find the word for it. It is not only the face. It is a way of occupying space, a self-evidence you do not remember deciding on and do not remember letting go of either. You put the photograph back in the box without concluding anything. Half an hour later, while doing something else entirely, the question comes back in a sharper form: was what disappeared really you, or only the way people looked at you back then? You have no answer, and you notice that you had never asked yourself the question in those terms before.

To try: Take ten minutes to write a single sentence: what makes you who you are, without speaking of appearance, age or what you do for others. If the sentence does not come, that is not a failure of the exercise, it is its result — it indicates that your identity supports have until now been external, which explains the current wavering and points precisely to what there is to build.

Personal worth

On a Tuesday, someone younger than you asks your advice on a complicated file. You answer without hesitating, and you can see from their face that the answer was useful. There is a very brief moment, just afterwards, when you feel something simple and solid: you know how to do this, and you have known for a long time. It is neither pride nor vanity, it is almost a kind of calm. That moment does not last — the meeting resumes, someone else speaks louder — but it took place. In the evening, when you think back over your day, it is not that instant you remember. You remember the meeting where nobody asked you anything. The advice given that morning appears nowhere in your accounting of the day, as if it did not count, as if it went without saying. It is perhaps the most revealing thing about your day, and it is precisely the thing that left no trace.

To try: This week, note those moments — the ones where you know how to do something and where it is useful. Three lines are enough. You are not trying to reassure yourself: you are correcting a set of books that systematically records the silences and lets the evidence slip through. This is the dimension that holds up best in your profile, and it is the one to feed first, because it carries all the rest.

Social gaze and age

Departmental meeting, a Thursday at two o'clock. A project is launched, names are cited, pairings are arranged. Yours is not spoken. Nobody sidelined you, there was neither remark nor decision: you simply were not thought of. You note something in your notebook to give yourself something to do. On the way back, you replay the scene and wonder whether you should have raised your hand, whether you should have said something. Then a heavier thought arrives: was it already like this last year, or is it just beginning? You cannot answer, and it is that doubt that weighs most. In the evening, you hesitate over sending a message to your manager to put yourself forward for the project. You draft three lines, you reread them, you find they sound insistent, and you do not send them.

To try: Answer this question with facts rather than with an impression: over the past twelve months, list the actual occasions when you were not approached, with the dates. That list will settle it one way or the other. If it is short, your fear is anticipating. If it is long, you do not have a self-esteem problem — you have a documented professional problem, which is dealt with on its own ground and with the right people.

Willingness to talk about it

A Sunday lunchtime, with family, someone makes a joke about age — with no malice, the usual joke. You laugh along with the others, and you feel very distinctly the small gap between the laugh and what you actually feel. Later, in the kitchen, your sister asks you whether everything is all right. You have two seconds to decide. You answer that yes, you are just tired at the moment, and the conversation moves on to something else. On the way home, you tell yourself that you could have answered differently, that you almost wanted to, and that what stopped you was not reticence but the thought that you would be answered with a compliment. "But you look great", "you don't look your age" — you can already hear the sentence, and you know that after it there will be nothing left to say. It is a kindness that closes the door, and you would still rather not open it.

To try: If you open this subject with someone close to you, say straight away what you expect from it: "I'm not looking for you to reassure me, I need to say something." On this theme, the spontaneous response is almost always a well-meaning compliment, and a compliment closes the conversation more surely than a disagreement. One framing sentence is enough to change the nature of the exchange entirely.

A social place withdrawing, not a self-esteem falling

This is the reading this report favors, and it must be presented as a hypothesis. It proposes that the main movement is external — a place, a visibility, a being-sought-out that are diminishing — and that your self-esteem is holding firm underneath. Your scores support it, since personal worth is high while the social gaze is very low. But a score profile does not establish causality, and the reverse reading remains possible: a dented confidence may lead to putting oneself forward less, and therefore to being sought out less. If, in reading these pages, you have the feeling that something more intimate and more painful is being minimized here in favor of a comfortable social explanation, it is your experience that is right, not this text.

A reaction to a work context, not to menopause

Menopause offers a convenient explanation because it is datable and located in your body. A competing reading would put the professional context at the center: a reorganisation, a change of manager, a rejuvenated team, a profession that is transforming. These elements produce exactly the same answers — feeling outpaced, fearing the loss of one's place, doubting one's legitimacy — and they would not have disappeared had menopause not occurred. The coincidence in time is misleading, because these two developments often arise in the same decade. This hypothesis has a considerable practical advantage: if it is right, what there is to address lies within a professional setting, with concrete levers, and not in work on yourself.

Something long-standing that the period has reawakened

A third reading, more demanding, would consider that menopause created nothing but reactivated a long-standing way of functioning: an old need to be seen and recognized, an old fear of being at fault or behind, an old difficulty in existing without the gaze of others. On this hypothesis, the period is not the cause but the occasion, and what is at play today was already at play differently at other ages. The way to settle it is simple and requires candour: did these movements exist before, in other forms? If the answer is yes, that is not bad news — it simply points to work carried out over time, with a professional, and one that goes far beyond the question of menopause.

What if this withdrawal suited you, without your having recognized it yet?

This reading is rarely offered and it deserves to be put seriously. It is possible that part of what you experience as a loss is in fact a loosening that you would not have chosen but that does not disserve you: less obligation to be agreeable, less energy devoted to being looked at, less time spent measuring up. Many women describe, some years after this period, a relief they had not expected and would not have known how to name at the time. Your high personal worth makes this hypothesis credible in your case, and your willingness to talk about it puts you in a position to settle it yourself. One necessary reservation: this reading only makes sense if it comes from you. Offered from outside in order to close down a legitimate complaint, it would be a polite way of telling you to put up with it.