Embracing the Sage Advice of Your Teenage Self in Midlife
I know this is upside down to what we usually hear but there is magic to be found.
You may have heard Peri-menopause being called “second puberty”. In Chinese Medicine we call the the Second Spring as it’s the second time around that we go through this hormonal change, except in reverse.
Our pituitary gland and our hypothalamus (the HPO axis) begin to receive the message that it’s time to down tools in the ovary department and over a great many years (any where up to 15) slowly but surely our endocrine otherwise known as our hormone system including our brain is completely reconfigured.
I go into this in a-lot more depth from both a western medical perspective and a Chinese Medicine perspective in my ReWilding Midlife Immersion. Pop your name on the waitlist to know when I’m running the next group.
It’s not small feat. But it was also no small feat the first time around. At the age of 12 or 13 we are going through these changes with no life experience and often (for those of us in Gen X wrangling our changing hormones now) we had very little information.
So how did we cope?
What did we do when we felt like we wanted to cry and burn the world down?
Who did we go to for support and care?
Can you remember how it felt, or what your life looked and probably smelt! (hello impulse) like when you were this age?
What might our teenage selves have to say if we asked them about what they would like us to do as we enter this second transition?
I have been very curious about this, and have found myself remembering a hopefulness, and curiosity about life that I could do with a dose of right now.
I was creative, I sang and played music, I was (for a very brief moment) unencumbered by being cool or trying to keep up.
How about you?
I’m at an age now where many of my friends have daughters getting their periods and celebrating with parties or quiet picnics, special gifts and fun packages with period products in them.
One of my dearest friends Kate, who I’ve known since we were in her late teens and my early 20’s asked me 13 years ago to be her first daughters fairy god mother.
I’ve been known as Fairy G even since.
And some how it’s been 13 years since that date as Kate called me last year, not long after they had returned to London after being out here, to tell me Annabelle had her first period. On the new moon no less! We were both so excited!
*Cue Mists of Avalon montage IYKYK
She was asking Bell’s female relatives and aunties and her besties and school mums to write/ draw/ share something for a book that she was putting together for her.
The most glorious, gorgeous and helpful keepsake you have ever seen! The letter below (for paid subscribers) is the letter I sent her, it’s everything I wish I had have known and more.
What I’ve notice in Annabelle and her peers and even my own 10 year old niece is that these kids are WISE! and I don’t just think it’s the internet. I wonder if we were wiser than we were given credit for?
(I mean yes the blue eyeliner and perm were an issue I see that now, but I was 15 living in north Queensland and Guns and Roses were a thing.)
So what might your teen self share with you if you could time travel back, or invite her into your life now? What would she eye-roll and demand you get rid of and what might she surprise you with curiosity about?
I have found the best way is to do this is to just write free form and to just imagine she’s talking and your writing all she has to say. (I do find actual writing to be helpful here). Is there something she wises we could finally do? Something we let go of that we’d like to pick back up? A long held habit that it’s time to let go of.
There are no rules with this, just the ever present ability to bring all of our wise magical parts into the present moment. Let me know how you get on.
(and you are more than welcome to share this idea with your daughters I’d love to know what they think)
x
Thank you so much Kate for asking me to write this letter to Belle. You’re an extraordinary Mother, and I have adored being a whimsical faraway Fairy G to your girls.
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