Episode 18: Hot Flashes & Brain Frog

Stacey Copeland  00:01

You’re listening to the Amplify Podcast Network.

 

Susan Holbrook  00:09

I love one of my epigraphs. It’s Louise Foxworth, who talks about writing a book on menopause, and people hearing about it, and there’s like a spasm of alarm in their face. So when my book came out, I noticed that too! So like men, actually, a couple of them came to me and said, Am I allowed to go to your launch? And I thought, WHAT?  These were, like, good guys. I was so confused, because I thought, well, it’s writing. I really worked hard on this writing. Don’t you want to hear the writing?

 

Susan Holbrook  00:44

It’s not considered universal the way that a battle story is considered universal. And maybe there’s something a little shameful about it, and women need to have their little private conversations about it.

 

Sally Chivers  01:00

Welcome to Wrinkle Radio where the stories we tell about aging matter. I’m your host, Dr Sally Chivers, and I am so glad you’re here. I’m joined this episode by Susan Holbrook. We’re going to talk about hot flashes and brain frog. You heard that right. Listeners have been asking for this for a while. Wrinkle Radio’s first menopause episode.

 

Susan Holbrook  01:28

I started writing it because I was interested in the genre of short comic memoir. So this was a genre experiment for me. So I love David Sedaris  and Jenny Slate and the little Shouts and Murmurs in the New Yorker. I love that short form comic prose, and I wanted to try it. What was on my mind? I was going through menopause. So I wrote the hot flashes, the first hot flashes. And it was so fun. It was incredibly fun to write. I wrote a couple more things about how my life was going at that point, and they were all about menopause. And I thought, Oh, maybe I will write a collection of these. I really hit the structural engine when I realized I could organize it by symptoms. So if you go online, you’ll find 20 symptoms, 40 symptoms, even 120 symptoms is one of them.

 

Sally Chivers  02:31

That’s Susan Holbrook, Canadian poet and professor of English and creative writing at the University of Windsor. The book she’s talking about is Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology published recently by Coach House Press. If you want to find a book about menopause these days, you’re spoiled for choice. There’s self help books, there’s novels, there’s even TV shows about menopausal and post menopausal women … often starting a podcast. This book, Steamy, is different. It’s a menopause symptomology. Instead of a table of contents, there’s a table of symptoms: fertility, hot flashes, cessation of menses, night sweats, mood and then there are five bonus symptoms: individuation, hotter flashes, invisibility, thoughts of mortality, fewer shits, bringing the total to 45 symptoms, some of which we’re going to talk about in this episode. Someone might come to this book looking for an authoritative medical guide, better than what you might find on the internet when you google or ask chat GPT about menopause symptoms. Instead, you find the authority of Susan Holbrook’s experience in conversation with women and connected to a lifetime of feminist poetics, and that approach really gets at how menopause is a weirdly individualized but common experience.

 

Susan Holbrook  04:01

So it ended up being about menopause. And then the funny thing was, when I launched it, I still hadn’t completely accepted that, so everybody wanted to come and talk to me about menopause, as if I knew something about menopause, which I’m not an expert. I’m a writer, but I am an expert in so far as every woman who goes through it is one. So they wanted to ask me about that, rather than, like, talk about writing, and I don’t know, it was kind of cool in a way.

 

Sally Chivers  04:27

I’m going to read you one of the symptom descriptions from the book, and I chose one specifically because it is a symptom that I Googled, so now I am reading Susan’s experience of this as expressed in Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology. This is symptom 17, burning mouth syndrome.

 

Burning Mouth Syndrome?

 

This is not on the standard shortlist of symptoms. But when my mouth was burning and I googled it I read that a flaming gob can be a consequence of folate deficiency or high tastebud density or diabetes or, you know, menopause.

 

This is the way menopause sneaks more symptoms in, by piggybacking on innumerable other conditions. Sore wrists? Could be carpal tunnel. Or menopause. Tinnitus? Too much drumming, or menopause. Facial tic, leg bent the wrong way, overabundance of snot? Menopause, meno pause, menopause.

 

Couldn’t they come up with a better name than Burning Mouth Syndrome? I’m not sure why some conditions get all the Latin. My pigmentation disorder has two awesome, legit-sounding names: leukoderma and vitiligo – take your pick! (I prefer vitiligo because it sounds like it could find you a flight to Cabo San Lucas for under $200 or rouse a droopy midlife libido).

 

But then I’m like ‘Doc, my legs feel all restless’ andthey’re like ‘There’s a name for that – it’s called Restless Leg Syndrome. And it’s a symptom of menopause.’

(from pg 48 of Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology)

 

Sally Chivers  06:22

I’m picturing that process of googling symptoms. Burning mouth syndrome comes to my mind from your book, because I had that experience and I looked at it, and the way you talk about how that’s named, seriously, this feeling that my mouth is burning is something called burning mouth syndrome, which is hilarious and also awful, because it means other people have it and I have it and it’s a thing. It’s not like, oh, I burnt my mouth and it’s going to go away.

 

Susan Holbrook  06:53

Yeah, yeah, no, it’s actually a thing. And how long is it going to last?

 

Sally Chivers  06:56

The way that your book is structured around a symptom, as you described it like a prompt. I think that mirrors, how many people do Google menopause see a list of symptoms and then riff on it in their mind. There is that kind of running commentary that we have with ourselves, where we’re like, Well, I have that, but I don’t have that. Or do I really have hot flashes because I haven’t drenched the bed. I just have not worn an over-the-head hoodie in years.

 

Susan Holbrook  07:30

You have to be able to layer and de–layer.

 

Susan Holbrook  07:34

We have these conversations with ourselves, and if we’re lucky, we also have them with our friends. And that’s also what the book became, because all my friends were in the same cohort. We were all talking about these things that I realized this is who I’m dedicating it to, to them, and then to people I don’t know yet. You know people who are not my friends yet, it’s for them too.

 

Sally Chivers  07:55

That makes me think about age cohort, (Susan: yeah), rather than generation, which is such a troubled term and has become this Battlefront in popular discourse, but your specific age cohort, whatever it may be. And I think you and I are similar, but slightly separated in age cohort,

 

Susan Holbrook  08:16

I’m 59 now,

 

Sally Chivers  08:17

yeah, and I’m … 53. Our age cohort or cohorts. Because I think it depends how we think about cohort. There was more silence,

 

Susan Holbrook  08:29

yeah

 

Sally Chivers  08:29

Than there is for my colleagues who are in their mid 40s now. And of course, not everybody goes through this experience, mid 40s to mid 50s, or 50s to 60s, or whatever the age is on whatever site you Google. Do you see that shift if you picture whatever your mother’s cohort’s, who you talk about in the book, experience of menopause is, yours, and then your offspring?

 

Susan Holbrook  08:56

I do. You know I have a friend who, and I think this is something people are starting to do, when her daughter had her first period, she sat her down and she had a talk about the whole cycle. So she talked to her about her first period, and she talked to her about menopause, which is not a talk I got.

 

Susan Holbrook  09:15

One gift I got from my mom. She didn’t talk about it too much, but I remember her saying, I think, in, I guess, post menopause, that she felt like a 10 year old kid, and that it felt amazing. And I have to say, Sally, that’s where I am at 59 now. It does feel like, once you get through it all, some of the, yeah, the sort of uncertainties and challenges afterwards, it feels great. I’ve always been interested in writing about things that you’re not supposed to talk about. And so even in this book, where I’m talking about menopause, in the chapter on cessation of menses, I talk about periods really, there’s a chapter about how ridiculously tsunami like my periods were in the menopause book. Yeah, so in some ways, I’m making up for lost time too, talking about things that still, in a way, are not completely out there. You know, I always think about going back to grad school and lots of theory, Kristeva’s’ powers of horror and she talks about semen has value, but menstrual blood it’s considered waste or garbage. Remember that movie, it had Cameron Diaz in it. What’s wrong about Mary? Or what’s the thing about Mary? What was that? What was that called?

 

Sally Chivers  10:31

Yeah, I know the one you mean.

 

Sally Chivers  10:32

See symptom eight, brain frog. And that is not a typo. The movie that Susan and I were trying to think the title of is There’s Something About Mary,

 

Susan Holbrook  10:44

She famously put semen in her hair,

 

Sally Chivers  10:49

right!

 

Susan Holbrook  10:49

And that’s a gag, and that’s so hilarious. You would never see Ben Stiller putting menstrual blood in his hair. Or,

 

Sally Chivers  10:57

yeah,

 

Susan Holbrook  10:57

we don’t have a word for it in English, but vaginal lubrication, like, that’s nothing, that’s not a visible thing, that’s nothing learned about as young people. There’s a word in French, cyprine, we don’t have a word in English. So there’s a lot of things that are still fairly silenced and visible, of course, and menopause is just coming out of it.

 

Sally Chivers  11:03

My podcast editing software transcribes as I go. It cannot read the word menopause. I’ve gotten male applause, paramedical paramedicopause. It’s making up words rather than naming something very common. It’s another sign of how sexist and silencing these technologies are. But I have been part of the quiet around menopause myself.

 

Sally Chivers  11:46

I remember looking at my English department and thinking how many women were in it who are around the same age, and thinking we were going to hit a point in that department where everybody was experiencing menopause like not exactly the same and not exactly the same time, and based on what I had observed from people in my life during menopause, it was going to be a stormy time for the department. And whether that’s a menopause symptom or whether it is also the result of us just keeping things in and behaving for so long and then having no more shits to give. I didn’t say that to anybody, because also that’s really essentialist

 

Susan Holbrook  12:39

It’s pathologizing. Yeah,

 

Sally Chivers  12:41

I also thought, well, it’s not going to be something we could talk about. What are people experiencing. People now do talk a lot, I find, at the workplace about childcare and needing certain schedules so that they can pick their children up after work. But we don’t talk about, like, just leave that fucking window open! I don’t care if you’re cold, bring a sweater or a jacket. I can’t be naked in this meeting!

 

Susan Holbrook  13:06

Windsor’s smaller. There’s been a hiring freeze for a really long time. So everybody’s at the same place. We are more open about it. So in meetings, the fans come out, and actually a really beautiful male colleague of mine has been going through some hormone therapy for cancer, and so now he is getting sweats, hot flashes. Different genders are fanning themselves in our departments, which is interesting. I think that’s a fluke, you know, but in most contexts, you’re right. It’s not an open conversation.

 

Sally Chivers  13:30

I don’t want to miss what you’re saying about this also being about your writing. But I wondered if you could introduce a readership who may not have read the book yet to one of the sections that comes to your mind and how it’s about language and about menopause.

 

Susan Holbrook  14:03

I mean, brain frog is clearly about at play with language, right?

 

Sally Chivers  14:08

Yeah

 

Susan Holbrook  14:10

I loved just putting it in the table of contents, which with everything else that is actually most everything else is pretty normal that you would find on the list, vision problems, reduced immune function. And then suddenly, brain frog that looks like a typo, and then you realize

 

Sally Chivers  14:24

it does. Yeah,

 

Susan Holbrook  14:25

I don’t know if you want me to read it, or

 

Sally Chivers  14:27

that’d be great.

 

Susan Holbrook  14:29

Brain frog is a very common symptom of perimenopause and menopause, and many women say that their brains feel as if stuffed with kitten world. You might have noticed that you are increasingly forgetful, can’t remember gnomes,lose your keister, write endless tada! lists, become confusedly easy, and find it hard to remain in formation. This can make it especially hard to function a twerk, and you might juggle to concentrate when reeking or washing

TV.

These symptoms can be so severe that you may even start to worry that you have de munchies. This is particularly scary if you have a foamy hysteria, and some women become so concerned that they are refried for tasting at a mummery clinic. Fortunately, the right type and dose of

homo replacement threnody (HRT) (with Toblerone for those who need it) can improve brain frog and help you thunk more clunkly.

(from pg 31 of Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology)

 

Brain frog was something I Brain Fog [both laugh] I definitely had, and I can’t tease it from the concussion I had, the pandemic, all anxiety, all that stuff. But you know, in that one, I chose not to go the memoir route, and just play with the kind of information that we can find about a symptom, and then frog it up.

 

Sally Chivers  15:48

I love that you read the brain frog section. The other one that comes to mind, almost as a contrast to that, is the urinary incontinence, which I keep calling bladder leaks, which I think is very interesting too, because I’m making it more like that leaky underwear. Leak has been something people can talk about because it might apply to your period, but also to urine. But the urinary incontinence chapter is so funny and so horrifying. I was telling my therapist, there’s a chapter about going to do a reading, and she has to throw her underwear in the garbage and tie her blazer around her waist. And you know, is running late, which I always am. I thought I was the only one, even though, obviously I know I’m not. I had never told her that I had bladder leaks. I had never told her wife, who happens to be my doctor.

 

Susan Holbrook  16:52

yeah Like, we’ll talk about hot flashes, but not about a lot of these other things. And the interesting thing about urinary problems is everybody has that doesn’t matter your gender, right? That’s just something that goes along with aging for a lot of people. I wanted to be honest.

 

Susan Holbrook  17:10

It’s funny you mentioned that one, because after my launch, the first question was, and this was from a student, so how do you feel that a room of people  avejust listened to you talk about your urinary incontinence. I mean, in other words, don’t you feel like really ashamed and embarrassed? She was quite curious. I really don’t! I think that I’ve always really appreciated work that is honest about that stuff, like I love it, and so I thought I want to give that to readers too, because I as a reader have always absolutely embraced that. So it’s not like everything is completely factual. It is completely honest in terms of the feelings going to a reading and peeing my pants in the car. That’s factual. That’s all facts.

 

Susan Holbrook  18:05

In order to make a good story, sometimes I just shift one thing this way or that, and maybe that’s another reason that I don’t feel embarrassed or humiliated. Writing is never exactly you. Even Sylvia Plath, she’s a confessionalist. In her famous poem, Daddy, she talks about suicidal feelings at 20 and at 30, and that her father died at 10. Her father died when she was eight. But to have that sort of poetic mathematical pattern in the poem, she shifted it. So the feelings are true, but the little facts are not necessarily and just knowing that there’s that slight shift between me, Susan, and what’s on paper. There’s always a shift, even if you’re trying to be completely factual, right? Once it’s on paper, it’s something else. The translation in language makes it something else. I don’t feel like I’m naked in the spotlight or anything like that. I’m just sharing human experience. There are some particulars that are mine, but it’s true that when you read about particulars, you think about your own particulars. It is conversational in that way. I hope,

 

Sally Chivers  19:08

Even if it was exactly you, it’s not you, right now.

 

Susan Holbrook  19:11

It’s not me right now.

 

Sally Chivers  19:13

right? You do your Kegels, right?

 

Susan Holbrook  19:16

Well, I would never drink a giant thermos of water, you know what I mean, and then lean over my seat belt to pick something up off the floor, like I realized that’s not a thing to do.

 

Sally Chivers  19:33

I was thinking when you were talking about how you alter the story Sylvia Plath being poetic about the decades of things happening in her life that we do that whenever we’re talking about ourselves to people, including in medical encounters, so we don’t necessarily fictionalize , ideally. When we go see a doctor about our bladder leaks, and maybe this is a poet, English professor thing, I think we do think about audience and we think about structure.

 

Susan Holbrook  20:13

Yeah,

 

Sally Chivers  20:14

The way the medical system is  you’re in the waiting room for however long, and then you’re gonna see the person for three minutes, five minutes, 15 minutes, if you’re lucky, and so you do shape yourself,

 

Susan Holbrook  20:25

and we get ourselves in trouble. Posterior vitreous detachment, the gel in your eye peels away from your retina, and usually it happens very gradually, but sometimes it’ll rip, and it can rip your retina as well. So that happened to me. I was sent to a specialist. And you’re right, we always think about our audience. I think, oh, he doesn’t have a lot of time. My doctor said, Oh, it looks like posterior vitreous attachment. So, so I go in, the women are very wonderful, helping me with the preliminaries. And then the doctor comes in. He doesn’t look at me. He just sits down, starts, tap, tap, tapping at the computer. He says, Okay, tell me what happened. And I said, Well, it seems I have a posterior of interest attachment. He said, NO, that’s not what I asked. Tell me what happened in your own words. You know what I mean? So sometimes we prepare too much and we think we’re doing the right thing.

 

Sally Chivers  21:19

Okay. Well, I was at home, I was making my coffee, and then I looked out and I saw a painted bunting thought, that doesn’t belong here

 

Susan Holbrook  21:26

I guess, that’s what he wanted [laughing]

 

Sally Chivers  21:26

Like, where do you want me to start the story? I find sometimes too, I’m so overwhelmed with detail, and I go in and I say something, they pick up on some early thing. It’s like, I’m not worried about my shoulder. I’m worried about peeing my pants, like my shoulder, yeah? Like, not the problem at the moment,

 

Susan Holbrook  21:45

Yeah, it’s just a little frozen.

 

Sally Chivers  21:47

I had that vitreous detachment happening slowly. Saran Wrap folded in front of your eye, kind of floater,

 

Susan Holbrook  21:54

yeah, that’s what it is, yeah, yeah.

 

Sally Chivers  21:56

And so I went in and I saw my eye doctor, who happens to be a fantastic woman in her 70s, and she pulled out an image that said the aging eye, and she covered the word aging,

 

Susan Holbrook  22:10

yeah,

 

Sally Chivers  22:11

And she’s like, Oh, don’t pay attention to that. That’s all I want to pay attention to! I’m sol interested in aging, and I’m so interested in those moments when you’re like, Oh crap, me though. I talk about it all the time, aging.

 

Susan Holbrook  22:24

Yes?

 

Sally Chivers  22:25

I do find those moments when it’s like, okay, but my actual body is doing this now.

 

Susan Holbrook  22:30

Yeah,

 

Sally Chivers  22:31

they hit you, right?

 

Susan Holbrook  22:32

How interesting for you.

 

Sally Chivers  22:34

I think for a lot of people. There are all these possibilities, but you don’t know which part of that symptomology that you have is going to be actually you.

 

Susan Holbrook  22:43

 

 

Sally Chivers  22:43

if you Google all the symptoms: I have that and that, but not that, and then you see it, okay, that is me. It’s that moment when you realize, oh, … my experience.

 

Sally Chivers  23:01

One of the sections I found complicated to read was declining fertility. Because it turns out maybe I wasn’t actually fertile ever, but I will never know. When I went for fertility testing I was 41 and they were like, oh, yeah, no, it’s your age, because at 42 apparently you just all of a sudden are no longer a good candidate for in vitro fertilization. You’re done. I don’t know what happens on that birthday that you just kind of dry up and you’re done, right? That is part of what we mourn at that moment of menopause, because the symptoms are coming from a change to our reproductive system, right? And for you, you talk about it as you knew you wanted you know, 1700 children, right?

 

Susan Holbrook  24:02

So for me, the grief was that I had only one,

 

Sally Chivers  24:05

yeah, and you’re done.

 

Susan Holbrook  24:07

I waited until I was 46 before I had that little procedure. They can do the ablation, because I couldn’t bear it,

 

Sally Chivers  24:14

because of what it would mean, right? That that is done. For me, it was an acknowledgement a little earlier than a lot of people do experience that it wasn’t going to happen. There is a grief, right? And an acknowledgement that that part of our life, however it played out, is over. You talk about the kind of freedom and happiness that you feel like that 10 year old kid again now,

 

Susan Holbrook  24:42

yeah,

 

Sally Chivers  24:44

but one of the differences is you’re not a 10 year old kid playing with dolls, imagining they will be your future offspring. You have that part of your life settled,

 

Susan Holbrook  24:56

and there’s all these different kinds of grief.  because then she left, you know, she’s at university, far, far away. That’s a classic empty nest syndrome, but it is different eras and relationships, or non relationships, that we grieve. So that’s in dry eyes that I talk about, yeah, because I don’t cry anymore. But that was one time I really obviously did which we had to say goodbye.

 

Sally Chivers  25:31

When you say you don’t cry, it’s because you don’t have tears.

 

Susan Holbrook  25:36

Oh, the truth is

 

Sally Chivers  25:37

Or are you describing that as emotional?

 

Susan Holbrook  25:38

[laughs] They’re all interlinked. It’s because of the drug I take for anxiety, which was for me, menopausal onset. So I hadn’t had anxiety before, so I got on a drug. That’s fantastic, but the one weird side effect is that I don’t cry. I don’t get intensely sad. I was using it, as I often do in this book, like a little more metaphorically, to talk about emotion and crying, but I also talk about putting contacts in, and I’m getting stuck, so I do think they are the eyes are a little dryer, for sure.

 

Sally Chivers  26:16

This made me think about the idea of age cohort that Susan and I talked about earlier in the episode. Being in our 50s, Susan and I lived through a shift where Prozac and related medications became mainstream. Our hesitation about these medications is not about the stigma of mental illness, it’s about an understanding of power, hierarchy, medical systems and capitalism,

 

Susan Holbrook  26:42

I don’t know why I’m talking about Sylvia Plath today, but you know, you have to think about her mental health also as being societally inflected. What’s  it like to be incredibly brilliant and be pat on the head, right? Or what’s it like to have somebody squirm away when they find out that you’re writing a book about menopause, right? Yeah, when you say the word menopause, they look at you like, you know, like you just handed them a plate of shit, you know, like,

 

Sally Chivers  27:10

yeah.

 

Susan Holbrook  27:11

What does that do when people change the way they talk about you, look at you, interact with you. That affects your mental health, too.

 

Sally Chivers  27:19

Exactly.

 

Susan Holbrook  27:22

I had resisted. I’d always was I was afraid of drugs. You know, I just resisted it. In the chapter on panic attacks that I think I detail the experience that made me realize, okay, I need a little help because it got so severe

 

Sally Chivers  27:36

Well, exactly. And I think that’s the complicated situation for those of us in our age cohort, but also with our critical orientation and our feminist politics. We understand the way women have been treated for centuries and the idea of the wandering womb of hysteria. We used to joke when you  oto the doctor, never say you’re stressed. Are you experiencing stress? No never been more relaxed in my life. Not that. Prescribing those kinds of medications, it is like first line treatment for so many things. And yet, many people do start taking those medications in menopause, perimenopause, because either they realize, like, I’m not going to navigate this anymore, something they’ve been experiencing a long time, or just like postpartum depression, postpartum OCD is triggered by hormone response that happens with menopause as well. It’s complicated, and that’s what I love about your book is that you’re not coming down on one side or another, really about much.

 

Susan Holbrook  28:48

I really wanted it to be an exploration, rather than giving a bunch of answers or arguments. The only true line argument would be, I hope, a feminist one, which was hard sometimes, because I really wanted to be honest, and in the chapter called chills, I didn’t have chills. So I just thought, what was chilling? What was a little chilly? And I had this experience of the male gaze changing on me, being assessed from a distance by a man like well, being ogled. And then as he got closer, he looked at me a little more carefully, and then his face just went slack. Like, oh, my God, I was all ogling an old lady. I wanted to be honest that my feeling in that moment was … shame, like a little bit of grief, like, what? What happened? Rejection. I didn’t enjoy admitting that, yeah, but it was the truth

 

Susan Holbrook  29:46

And as I say in the last chapter, fewer shits, if it happened now, who cares? But at that stage, I wasn’t comfortable yet. I hadn’t given enough thought to what it meant. And what was going on.

 

Sally Chivers  30:01

Obviously, it takes a long time to write a book like Steamy. Once a book comes out, it’s way younger than you, like it is from a past you. Do you look back at some of the sections and think, oh, Susan, you were so young at that moment?

 

Susan Holbrook  30:25

Yeah, for sure, chills, really does. I don’t really care at all if anybody thinks I’m cute or not, except for 59 year old butch woman, [Sally: right?] There’s some like, say bloating, where I have a little graph that shows the increase in Belly Bloat over time and the increase in Ego bloat over time. I look at that and I say, yeah, it’s still true. It all continues like it continues. Your body starts to change into a different kind of shape, I think for a lot of women, and I was one of them, like letting go what other people think? Just, I don’t know, it just like, inflates your confidence and it feels fantastic. So that is still true. Some of that stuff, like I’m still living in, because some of the chapters were sort of written in the post menopausal era, but some were peri, and then some were menopausal or whatever, all these different eras. But wow, you really go through so many different experiences in that 10 or so years. So they’re all me. They’re all me.  But a really prismatic view of me,

 

Sally Chivers  31:37

Very young child, Susan, is really, really present in the book, and I think that is fascinating. And one of the parts of the book that was just balm to me, I just needed to remember that kind of youth and those hopes and fears and weird experiences that we had being socialized into a world that just isn’t always ready for who and how we are. That’s letting the world off a little bit by saying it isn’t ready. But, you know, not equipped for us.

 

Sally Chivers  32:16

We’ve talked about this a little bit. What is getting better? And what do you see getting better for you as you continue to age, post the post of menopause,

 

Susan Holbrook  32:26

The comfort and the confidence number one. The first 10 or 15 years of teaching, I was terrified every September. Though I loved what I did, the price I paid was just all the anxiety around public speaking. Now I’m fine, and it’s just wonderful. Like everyone’s talking about retirement coming soon, and I’m like, Well, I’m not. I’m just finally hitting my stride, like I finally really, really enjoy being in the classroom, so that’s nice. And I love not actually being in thrall to sex, like I’m not in thrall. Like, sexuality is part of my life, but I don’t know the way it used to just get me into so much trouble that just doesn’t happen. I mean, that’s another issue. Like, historically, all these medical men, some would say menopausal women were too sexual, and some would say they were neuters. Like, [Sally: yep], whatever it is, it’s wrong. Yeah, I think you do know yourself more. I love spending time on my own. Absolutely. I know what brings me joy, aside from lovely family relationships and friends and stuff, it’s creativity. So writing, playing a piano, doing art, I’m not really afraid, except if I can’t do that. But I feel like even if I’m not terribly mobile, I could still do that to some degree. So I’m not afraid of my own future. I would say I am afraid of the future, though, you know in general. So what’s happened to our climate, the move to the right, no respect for one another. I mean tech ticking over our brains. I’m I’m really scared about all that stuff, but it doesn’t have to do with my age so much.

 

Sally Chivers  34:18

You have been listening to poet and Professor Susan Holbrook talking to me, your host, Dr Sally Chivers, about menopause symptoms and so much more. You can read more about it in her book, Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology. To help you find it in the bookstore, here’s a little tip from the author.

 

Susan Holbrook  34:39

My book is shelved under medical. I don’t think of it that way. I don’t know what it is. Maybe that’s the problem. Memoir.  Humor.

 

Sally Chivers  34:47

I think that’s what you get for calling it symptomology.

 

Susan Holbrook  34:53

I just love it. The word.

 

Sally Chivers  34:55

Imagine someone going, I’m gonna get a book to help me through this, and they see your book: symptomology, great. And they just glance the table of contents, okay, there’s a couple typos, like brain frog, whatever, people are in a hurry and they start reading. And they’re like, this isn’t gonna help me. And then, you can read this book quickly. You can read it very slowly. There’s many ways to read it. It’s, I think, accessible in all the very good ways. I see that as a little bit of Guerilla anti ageism.

 

Susan Holbrook  35:23

That’s nice. I love that.

 

Sally Chivers  35:32

I’m so grateful to Susan Holbrook for taking the time to talk to me and to Coach House Press for sending me an advance reading copy of Steamy. Thank you also to the Aging and Data project for your support of Wrinkle Radio. And thanks to all of you, please tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your colleagues, keep the window open. Buy yourself a zip up, not a pullover hoodie, and remember, don’t panic. It’s just aging

 

Music  36:26

Outro music