You didn’t know you were playing. Nobody handed you a card or explained the rules. But somewhere in your early to mid 40s the squares started filling in, one by one, until you looked up one day and realized you had a very full card and absolutely no prize to show for it.

This is perimenopause bingo. Consider it a love letter to every woman who has ever stood in a room wondering why she walked in there, cried at a paper towel commercial, or woken up at 3am for no earthly reason feeling like something is definitely wrong.

You are not alone. You are not broken. You are simply playing the same game as millions of other Canadian women who also didn’t get the rulebook.

Let’s check your card.

Not because you need the bathroom. Not because there was a noise. Just awake. Fully, completely awake at an hour no reasonable person should be awake, thinking about something you said at a work function in 2011. Your body has decided that sleep is optional and your past is worth reviewing in detail. You lie there. You wait. You think about the 2011 thing some more.

You were not hot. The room was not hot. Nobody else was hot. There was no identifiable cause. And yet. You have started keeping a spare shirt within reach at night. Your husband is buried under three blankets on his side while your side of the bed has nothing but a fan. He has stopped asking why.

It was right there. On the tip of your tongue. A completely ordinary word, one you have used ten thousand times. And then it was gone. Your family has learned to wait while you circle it. “The thing. The flat thing. You put food on it.” A plate. It was a plate. You knew that. It will happen again tomorrow with a different word and your family will wait again.

Triggered by: a cupboard left open. A question asked at the wrong moment. The particular way someone is chewing right now. You are not proud of this. The anger is real, and it’s fast, and it’s completely disproportionate to a cupboard door. Twenty minutes later it’s gone and you feel fine and slightly confused about what just happened.

You are not broken. You are simply playing the same game as millions of other women who also didn’t get the rulebook.

Arrived uninvited. Refuses to leave. You changed nothing. You ate the same things. You moved the same amount. And yet your body has quietly decided to store everything now, just in case, specifically around your middle, which is new. This is not a willpower problem. Estrogen affects how and where the body stores fat, and as it shifts, so does the distribution. It is annoying. It is also not your fault.

Something is wrong. You don’t know what. There is nothing wrong. Something is definitely wrong. You run through the list: kids are fine, relationship is fine, work is fine, nothing is on fire. The feeling doesn’t care. It sits in your chest anyway, vague and insistent, usually arriving around 3am when you’re already awake for the other square. Fluctuating estrogen affects how the brain regulates the stress response. The anxiety is real. The emergency is not.

His cologne. The one you chose. The one you have always liked. You cannot be in the same room as it now. Something about it has crossed a line you cannot explain and cannot uncross. It is not just cologne. Perimenopause can sharpen smell sensitivity significantly, and scents that were once neutral or pleasant can become overwhelming or actively offensive. You are not being dramatic. Your nose has simply changed its mind and informed no one.

You noticed it on your hands first. A slight crepe to the skin that wasn’t there before, fine lines that appeared without warning, a texture that catches the light differently than it used to. Then your face, just enough to make you look at photos from five years ago and feel the difference. You have started reading the back of moisturizer bottles like they contain answers. Some of them cost more than your first car payment. You buy them anyway because something has to work. The collagen loss is real and estrogen-related, which is useful to know and doesn’t make it less annoying.

Not the good kind of crying, where something moves you and the tears make sense. The other kind. The kind that arrives before you know why, that stops without resolving anything, that leaves you standing in the dairy aisle slightly confused about what just happened. It doesn’t feel like yours. It feels like something running in the background, a process you didn’t start and can’t quite stop. Estrogen plays a significant role in how the brain regulates emotion, and when it fluctuates, your responses stop following the script you know.

Which joint? All of them. You got up from the couch and your knees made a sound that caused your teenager to look up from their phone. You creaked getting out of the car. Your hands are stiff in the morning in a way they weren’t a few years ago. Estrogen has anti-inflammatory properties, which means that as it fluctuates, joints that were previously quiet start to have opinions. You have become a percussion instrument. Nobody asked for this.

You wake up and your heart is going faster than seems necessary for someone who is just lying there. You monitor it. You count the beats. You consider whether this is a thing. You Google it at 2am, which we will get to. You are probably fine. Heart palpitations are a documented perimenopause symptom, driven by the same hormonal fluctuations behind most of the other squares on this card. Worth mentioning to your doctor. Almost certainly not the emergency it feels like at 2:20am.

You described the sweating, the sleep disruption, the mood swings, the anxiety, the joint pain, and the brain fog. You were told to try to manage your stress levels. You left with a pamphlet. You have thrown the pamphlet away. This experience is so common it has become a dark joke among women in perimenopause, and the gap between what women report and what they receive at that appointment is a documented problem in Canadian healthcare. You were not imagining it. You were not heard. Those are different things.

It was wonderful. You slept. You felt like yourself. You thought: maybe it’s over. Maybe I’m through the worst of it. You made plans. You felt cautiously optimistic. And then it came back, and you were back on the card, and the week of normal felt like something you had imagined. It was not imagined. Perimenopause moves in waves, not in a straight line, and the good weeks are real even when they don’t last. Hold onto them. They will come again.

Perimenopause moves in waves. The good weeks are real, even when they don’t last.

You were at dinner. Someone mentioned not sleeping. Someone else said something about rage and a cupboard door, and there was a pause, and then everyone started talking at once. You compared notes for two hours. Nobody wanted to go home. It was the most useful conversation you’d had in years, and nobody had thought to have it until that night, because nobody told you this was coming and nobody told you that everyone around you was in it too. That dinner is worth repeating. Those conversations matter.

You had a reason. You had a whole reason. You walked into the kitchen with complete purpose, crossed the threshold, and your brain wiped itself clean. Now you are standing in front of the open fridge staring at the mayonnaise. You have put your keys in the pantry. You have found your phone in the crisper drawer. You have completely forgotten the name of a friend you have known for fifteen years, mid-sentence, while looking directly at her. It comes back. It always comes back. But the pause before it does is deeply unsettling.

You found it by accident. You looked so young and so certain and so completely unaware of what was coming. You wanted to reach through the screen and tell her to rest more, worry less, and enjoy the sleep. You also noticed the skin. Then you felt a wave of something that was equal parts nostalgia and grief and then you felt slightly ridiculous for grieving a photo, and then you cried a little anyway, because perimenopause does not require permission.

You searched for it. The internet was not helpful. It offered you supplements, relationship advice, and several articles that were optimistic in a way that felt slightly insulting. Low libido is one of the most common and least discussed perimenopause symptoms, driven by shifts in estrogen, testosterone, and the general exhaustion of running on disrupted sleep while managing a body that is doing something new every week. You are not broken and your relationship is not broken. This is a hormone story too.

Found it in the car mirror. Approximately three inches long. Thriving. You do not know how long it has been there. You do not know how you missed it. It was thick and confident and clearly very committed to its location, and the car mirror, specifically, was where you found it, because car mirrors are where all women find theirs. This is a deeply universal experience that almost no one talks about. You are not alone. We have all been there. The tweezers live in the car now.

Not a rash. Not an allergy. Not something you ate or touched or wore. Just itchy. Constantly. Possibly in a different place every day. Estrogen plays a role in skin hydration and histamine regulation, and as it fluctuates, some women experience persistent itching that has no obvious external cause. You have changed your laundry detergent. You have switched moisturizers. You have eliminated things one at a time like a very itchy scientist. The answer is probably still hormones.

Freezing. Then boiling. Then freezing again. No in between, no warning, no logic. The hot flashes get the most attention but the full picture is more chaotic: a body that has lost its internal thermostat and is improvising. You have layers within reach everywhere. You have a fan on your desk in November. You have left the room mid-conversation because something switched and you needed the cool hallway immediately. People who live with you have adapted. They no longer comment on the window.

Late. Early. Skipped entirely. Extremely not skipped. Lighter than it used to be. Heavier than anything you have experienced since your twenties. Arrived when you were in white pants. Did not arrive when you were expecting it and you spent three days quietly calculating whether something else was happening. Something else was not happening. It was just perimenopause, changing the terms of your cycle without consulting you, which is what it does.

Gone. Both of them. Same week. You used to be able to let things go. You used to have a buffer between the thing that happened and your response to it. That buffer has become very thin. Requests that would once have been fine now land differently. Interruptions that you would have absorbed now require real effort to absorb. You are not meaner. You are just more tired, more depleted, and running on a shorter rope. That is a different thing.

One glass. Just one glass. Why does one glass do this now. You used to be able to have a perfectly reasonable glass of wine with dinner and feel fine the next morning. Now one glass triggers a hot flash, disrupts your sleep, and leaves you feeling unreasonably terrible by 7am. The chemistry has changed. Estrogen affects how alcohol is metabolized, and as levels shift, the same amount does more. Nobody is moralizing. The wine is not the enemy. Your liver is just working with a different set of instructions now.

You started with “night sweats causes.” You ended up reading about autoimmune conditions, thyroid panels, and a forum thread from 2017 that scared you more than it helped. You were fine. This did not feel fine at the time. The impulse that sent you there, the need to understand what is happening in your own body, is completely reasonable. You deserved a straight answer. You just looked in the wrong place at the wrong hour. Write the questions down. Bring them somewhere useful in the daylight.

A full card does not mean something is wrong with you. It means you are in perimenopause, which is a real and specific hormonal transition that can last years, affects nearly every system in the body, and has historically been undertreated and underexplained. The squares are not random. They are connected. They have causes. And most of them have options, whether that is understanding what is driving them, making changes, or talking to a doctor about treatment.

You don’t have to collect the whole card quietly. Naming what is happening is the first step, and you just did that. The next one is finding someonewho will take the full card seriously.

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