The Strange, Sudden Crying No One Warned You About

I want to be clear about something before I get into this. I have always cried. Commercials, the Olympics, a thoughtful card from one of my kids, a movie that earns it, a movie that doesn’t earn it but tries hard. I cried when my favourite show got cancelled and I hadn’t even watched it in two years. Crying has never been the problem. I am a person who feels things, and for most of my life that was just part of how I move through the world.

So when I say that the crying that came with perimenopause is different, I want you to understand that I know what I am talking about. I have a long baseline. I’m not someone who mistook normal emotion for a symptom. I know what it feels like when something moves me. This is not that.

Perimenopause crying is a different animal entirely. Here is how I know.

Normal crying, for me, follows something. A moment lands, it moves me, the tears come. There is a sequence. It makes sense even when the thing that set it off is small, because I can trace the line from the stimulus to the response and understand why.

Perimenopause crying doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the tears are just there, already happening, and I am standing behind them trying to figure out what triggered it. There is no sequence. There is no moment I can point to. My eyes are wet and my throat is tight and somewhere in the background my brain is doing a quick scan, trying to match the response to a cause, and coming up empty. Was it the yogurt? The light? The fact that it is Tuesday? I couldn’t tell you.

When I cry at the Olympics, I know what that is. It is pride and awe and the particular feeling of watching someone achieve something enormous. The tears are reporting accurately on what is happening inside me.

Perimenopause crying sometimes reports on nothing at all. I’ll be fine. Completely fine. Not sad, not overwhelmed, not particularly moved by anything. And then something small happens, the grocery store is out of something I wanted, a stranger is unexpectedly kind, a song comes on that I had forgotten about, and my body treats it like a five-alarm situation. Full throat tightening. Eyes going hot. The works. While the rest of me is standing there going: I don’t think we needed to do all that.

It is not that the feeling is wrong. It is that the response is wildly out of proportion to whatever is happening. My emotional thermostat has lost the plot.

I have cried at beautiful things my whole life. I know what that feels like. This feels like a short circuit, not a feeling.

Regular crying, for me, has a shape to it. It builds and it peaks and it winds down and eventually I feel better, or emptied out, or whatever it is that crying is supposed to do. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end that makes sense.

Perimenopause crying just stops. Not because I’ve worked through anything. Not because something resolved. It just switches off. One minute I am in it, and then a few minutes later it is gone and I am left standing in my kitchen, or my car, or the dairy aisle, feeling slightly confused about what just happened. There is no catharsis. There is no release. There is just the crying, and then the absence of it, and the slightly bewildered feeling of someone who walked into a room and can’t remember why.

This is the one that is hardest to explain, and also the most important. I know my crying. I have spent decades with it. I know what it feels like when something really gets to me, when I am tired and running on fumes and close to the surface, when I am processing something that needs processing. I know the difference between feeling something and falling apart.

Perimenopause crying does not feel like mine. It feels like something borrowed, something that belongs to a version of me I do not recognize. I am watching it happen from a slight distance, mildly surprised, unable to stop it, not entirely sure it reflects anything real about my inner state. A friend once described it as “crying on behalf of no one in particular” and I haven’t found a better description since.

Estrogen does not only run the reproductive system. It plays a significant role in how the brain regulates emotion, including how you process and respond to emotional input. When estrogen starts fluctuating erratically, which is exactly what it does during perimenopause, your emotional responses can become harder to predict, harder to modulate, and harder to recognize as your own.

That uncanny feeling, the sense that the crying is happening to you rather than coming from you, has a biological explanation. Your brain is working with a hormone supply that is no longer reliable. The system that normally helps you calibrate your responses is running on an inconsistent signal. You are not broken. You are not losing your mind. You are perimenopausal, and there is a difference.

If the emotional volatility is frequent or severe, or if it’s starting to shade into something that feels more like depression than weepiness, that is worth bringing to your doctor. There are treatment options available, and this post on how to talk to your doctor about perimenopause is a good place to start if you’re not sure how to open that conversation.

If it feels different, that is because it is. Your hormones have changed the wiring.

If you have always been a crier and you’re thinking: this is probably just me, I want to push back on that. You know your crying. You know what it feels like when something really gets to you, and you know what it feels like when your body is just running a process that has nothing to do with what is happening in front of you. If the second one is new, if the crying feels unmoored and unfamiliar and not quite yours, that is information worth paying attention to. It doesn’t mean something is deeply wrong. It means your hormones are in transition and your brain is feeling it. That is a real thing. And it is one worth naming out loud, to yourself and to someone who can help.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personal medical guidance.