Lost Time

I will never forget the first time I lost my mind.

It was late December of 2020, and I was frantically searching my work computer for notes on a meeting that both my calendar and my coworkers told me I had attended, and yet I had zero recollection of ever being there, let alone what was decided.

This was not your normal forgetfulness. It wasn’t checking four times for your glasses, which are on your head; nor was it wondering where you’d put your car keys for the 15^th time in a week. This was a complete and total blank where my memory should be. This was Lost Time. It was a permanent hole in my brain where the memory of it should be.

While this example is extreme, brain fog is a common peri/menopause symptom. It manifests mostly as losing a word that is right on the tip of your tongue, and in normal usage in your vocabulary; or completely forgetting an appointment that would normally have stuck in your brain as a place for you to be at a given time, or the aforementioned losing the glasses that are literally on your head. It is akin to what many refer to as ‘pregnancy-brain,’ or, ‘mommy-brain.’

Like everything in this life phase, this brain fog is brought on by fluctuating, or dropping, levels of estrogen, which supports sharp brain function. It can be exacerbated by other peri/menopausal symptoms, such as lack of sleep, that can compound issues with memory function.

I left this particular job two months after this incident, and noticed few other memory-related issues until about six months later, when almost the exact same thing happened. Meeting with my boss at a new job, I mentioned we had to make staffing decision before I left for vacation. Her response?

“We decided that last week. We’re going to have them report to X.”

I was incredulous. No memory of this conversation. Zero. Zilch. No documentation of having a decision made, or communicating its outcome, was anywhere in my notes. A part of my brain is sure, to this day, that she had this conversation with someone else.

I said something aloud to the effect of, “this is so disturbing, why do I have no memory of this?”

Without skipping a beat, my boss said to me, “you have perimenopause brain.”

How dare she, I thought, while simultaneously having no idea what she was talking about. I had never heard of such a thing. Nor, at that point, had I realized I was in perimenopause. I barely knew what it was, and I was still getting periods regularly, so clearly this did not apply to me.

Setting aside this is not a very HR-appropriate thing for your boss to point out, in the next 48 hours, two other people said the exact same thing to me.

The immediate aftermath of both these instances was terrifying. Did I have Long Covid, despite never knowingly having had the illness? Did I have a serious brain issue? Was I getting dementia?

While it never hurts to check your brain health, especially if such conditions as Alzheimer’s or Early Onset Dementia run in your family (the Alzheimer’s Association has a quick list of ten signs or symptoms to check for if you are concerned), I’ve now realized these Lost Time moments, for me, come in phases, likely when I’m stressed or overworked. Then they dissipate for 6 months or more. While it’s irritating, partly because it’s a sign of age, it’s less frightening, since I still know what notes, and my car keys, are actually for.

That the first of these happened at work led me to wonder what other symptoms of peri/menopause I may have been having at the time that led me toward the decision to leave that job. Learning to rely on something other than my own memory has been a demoralizing adjustment for me, but it’s manageable. But other conditions that led to my departure – constantly feeling left out on a limb, unheard, frustrated with management, irritated by coworkers, enervated by the slow pace of progress in my workplace – were these real? Were they physiological? And the way I responded to them, which I didn’t like, and I know wasn’t workplace-appropriate anymore, was that impacted by changes in my biology that I wasn’t even aware of at the time?

The New York Times just published an article about this exact tension – between perimenopausal women and the workplace – noting that last year alone, this cost American women $1.8BN in lost working time – either from taking days off or from quitting all together.

This is a staggering, and admittedly under-estimated amount that doesn’t take into account the loss to workplaces of losing women who are experiencing these challenges. I may have forgotten a meeting, but what other creative and helpful solutions did I come up with in that month of December, 2020?

We may never know.