Saturday, August 9, 2014

The Change


Just as the changing of the seasons, change comes to us all.  There is the change that comes without our control - growing older, outside forces, the infinite march of time.  There is the change that comes with our control - choices.  But change comes and we can either change with it or fight against it, this is also a choice.

For a few years now I've been going through THE CHANGE for women.  It has not been at all pleasant and there are days I wish my female parts would just fall out like so much dried leaves in fall but no such luck. The hormones rage, hot flashes, night sweats, still with PMS most months, sometimes weeks at a time, weepy one day, mad as hell the next at nothing and everything.  It is like riding a never ending roller coaster that offers nothing but stomach turning badness.

This is of course the normal course of things if you are a woman.  Every woman experiences it differently.  It starts at different times for every woman. It can go on for years and years or it can start and end in less than a year.  I know women who say they have had the hot flashes for 20 years.  TWENTY YEARS!  I am going on about my 4th year of this "process" and the thought of a possible 16 more is close to unbearable.  I pray I am not one of those women and I feel sorry for those who are.

This change brings with it not only physical changes, but hormonal and emotional changes as well.  My doctor has told me I still have quite a bit of estrogen going on so I keep a lot of the same "symptoms" as I had previously.  The good thing is I might not dry up and wrinkle as quickly as some others.  The bad thing I still have all the symptoms.

I decided not to take hormones firstly for the risk of breast cancer, which has a history in my family and secondly because of the headaches they give me.  I have tried all sorts of natural and home remedies.  Some have helped, some not so much.  In the end, I think it's just something you have to go through.  Yet another change.

Women seem to experience change more often than men and so it becomes part of their existence, but women can also be some of the biggest change fighters there are.  Women who don't change in their approach to relationships from how they were as teens to what they should be as women.  Women who don't change what they wear from when they were teens to what they are now as women.  Women who keep the cliques and petty gossip and backstabbing they had as high schoolers and keep going with it as women.  The women who have to have plastic surgery after plastic surgery in hopes of remaining the same as they were as teens.  The women who get stuck in a job or a relationship because they are just too afraid to change.

Change can be scary and change can be hard but change is the only way to grow.  All growth, physical, emotional, spiritual, results in change.  All choices result in change.  Not all change is good.  In the end, there is the change that comes regardless of you and the change that comes because of you.  Only you can decide how to confront it.