I edited something the other day about menopausing, which as a form of a verb, emphasizes the pausing. I suppose I’d never noticed the pause in menopause, though there it means “meno-stop.” And that’s funny because “meno” in Finnish comes from the verb mennä, to go, a meno is a thing you’ve got going on, or an outgoing, an expense. Meno-stop, then, would mean to stop going out, stop being outgoing, stop going out of your way for others? That’s certainly what they say.
But at this stage in life the pausing, at least, can only be good. In Finnish the sandwich years are called the rush-hour years, the ruuhkavuodet. So much to do, so little time. Better, then, to stop going out of your way, to withdraw a little? To retreat.
I was talking to fellow writers about this a few weeks ago. What if we built a whole writing retreat around what would be good for us in (peri)menopause? A lot of the writers I work with are in midlife, anyway. Most of them are women or other people who menstruate(d). And on a structured writing retreat we have pauses, breaks built in. So what would be different from all the other retreats?
As I teeter on the edge of perimenopause and watch my friends and colleagues battle through it, I notice things we could be doing differently. We could be writing differently, then, too.
Brain fog is real. There needs to be a longer pause before the right word or phrase emerges. You might need to check things more than you used to. Is this irreversible, or will it pass? As our bodies change, our writing changes.
If you’d like to try menopausing to write, let me know. Let’s see what we can create together.
The image is indeed not Finnish, but from somewhere rather further south two months ago, where I started talking about some of these things.
new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit
