As someone now officially menopausal, who has had significant symptoms for about 2 years, I had a thought recently.

(For context, I’m having all the symptoms pretty bad: hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, fatigue, weight gain despite diet and exercise, irritability, random tearfulness, brain fogginess, hair thinning, random achiness, etc despite trying multiple treatments.)

I was in a line at a store. I was tired from not sleeping and having to get out of bed to change the sheets twice for soaking them with sweats, everything was annoying me because the irritability was high right then even without the context of waiting, I was feeling gross and uncomfortable in my body and clothes…

which was all bad enough. Then a hot flash started. I almost lost it at people in line doing normal dumb people shit. And I’m not that person. It usually doesn’t bother me.

I had the wherewithal to put my shopping basket down and just leave. As I sat in my car in my bra with the ac blasting and my shirt off on the passenger seat, crying unreasonably, I tried to work the whole thing out, and here’s my theory, and I think it might explain a subset of “karen” behavior.

I haven’t felt this out of control of the most basic of things — my body, my mind, my emotions — in over 35 years since puberty. And this change is both a loss of something profound existentially and the marker of going from being merely a second-class citizen because of being a woman to becoming societally invisible because I’ve lost my biological utility to the patriarchy.

There’s no power, there’s no control, and when the physical discomfort becomes unbearable on top of the emotional, mental, and existential… all that is left is terror, is panic. And rage.

I retreated when faced with that. But my flight could be another’s fight reaction.

Maybe?

To clarify, I mean like clips of some middle aged woman losing it over a place being out of something or because someone is being loud or whatever