The Serpentine Diary

I love menopause. I love the changes it has brought to my life. First and foremost is the loss of fear, a welcome change indeed. What Jan Frazier calls “the falling away of fear” in her book has had deeply echoing repercussions throughout my everyday life in unexpected ways. The most profound of those changes is that I no longer have the need to control everything in my life. I can well remember the days when, with my first husband, I so had to have everything in it’s place that when I cleaned house (which I did kind of constantly) I would round up all of ‘his stuff’ and put it in a cardboard box on the dryer. Jesus! Anyone want to hazard a guess as to why that relationship hit the rocks? I have gradually lost this overpowering need to control everything over the years but the grand finale arrived with “the change”

It’s kind of like hitting your head against the wall; you don’t realize how much it hurts until you stop. I didn’t realize how fearful I was, constantly, until it fell away. I had gotten used to the voices in my head that warned me against this and that and then everything else. The ‘what if’ voices that sometimes grew so insistent they kept me awake into the early hours of the morning if some big decision was pending. My mind is very quiet nowadays. The voice of my spirit is much easier to hear and the things that used to consume me simply don’t matter anymore. I am content to let life unfold and surprise me.

Ms. Frazier is more religiously oriented than I am and tends to think of this change as a sort of ‘enlightenment’. I have to admit that I don’t feel particularly enlightened….just free. Free to listen instead of talk. Free to give possessions away until only the most important and useful remain. Free to say yes to life’s unexpected twists and turns. Free to live in gratitude for the richness in my life; the richness that has nothing at all to do with ’stuff’ and free to just be.