Essay: Exit Interview
Photo: Robert E. Rutledge
Read also: Old, Unfeminine, Unreliable
And: Unreliable
Dear Hatshepsut
I’m turning 59 this year. My fucking fifties.
Wow, has this decade been a fucking rollercoaster. What?!
The 50s should come with a warning. Or at least an advisory: Caution! This decade will undo everything you thought you knew about yourself. Let go!
Soon after I turned 50, I would wake up with the most awful sense of dread and think “If this is what the rest of my life is like, I’m done.”
I love life, Hatshepsut. I love people. I’m not a romantic but I’m a sucker for people and life, whatever the fuck that means. I’m here. I’m here for it all: shit and shine. It’s not all sparkles and sheen, I know. But it can’t all be this anxiety and depression fuckery, can it?
The funny thing–not funny haha but are you fucking kidding me funny–is that I began my puberty in a state of depression and here I am beginning my postmenopause with depression.
Depression is the through line of my entry/exit interview.
And apparently, I’m not alone: two out of every three women 50+ in a new study report struggling with mental health. I’m not alone.
Now what?
I’m looking for a therapist. It is not something I take lightly. Whether it’s talk therapy, somatic therapy, psychedelics and talk therapy–I’m researching it all and I’m ready. Therapize me, New York City. I’m ready.
It feels like I’m being tasked with seeing in ways that my eyes have little experience with. Last week at acupuncture, the wonderful healer I see told me she was putting needles into areas that would facilitate a new way of seeing. A way that I am ready for now. I have worked hard to get here–lifting heavyweights and preparing myself physically, reckoning with past wounds and trauma and preparing myself emotionally.
The acupuncturist told me that when someone isn’t ready for that kind of vision, it’s as if they can’t handle a clean window and must muddy it to obscure the clarity that it brings.
Why am I being tasked with this now, Hatshepsut? Is it so that when the final exit interview is here, we leave light as a feather?
Soon after I turned 50 and those feelings of dread would hit first thing in the morning, I wondered if it was internalized ageism? I was horrified. How, I wondered, was this feminist panicking about getting older?!
It’s not that I think that I’m somehow immune to the fuckery of patriarchy, to its internalized self doubt. It’s more that I know better, don’t I?
But it wasn’t about getting older and ageism.
It was more a reckoning. A clearing of books and records. A decluttering of the heart and mind.
I’ve been in therapy twice. And both times helped me tremendously. But now it’s less about help and more about heft. I need to make room for the magnitude of life, of this age, of where I am and where I have been, of what’s ahead however long or short, and who I am and not what has happened to me.
Who am I, Hatshepsut, when I let go of what has happened to me? Who am I when I look at what a woman about to turn 59 is/should/could/would.
What do I point to when I want to signal me? My books? My essays? My friendships? Do any of those matter?
Those are ridiculous questions when I remember that for your 20-year-reign, you were the most powerful person in the ancient world. I’m powerful, too, Hatshepsut. I don’t rule a country or an empire, in the way you did. But I know that I’m powerful. And I am reckoning with what that power means and how I want to move with it and what I want to make of it as I turn 60.
In the era of celebrity culture in which I live, unless a celebrity says it or experiences it, it’s as if it didn’t happen. So now that celebrities have embraced and monetized menopause, when they’re selling us everything that covers us head to toe and genitals in between, we are apparently all powerful, all wonderful, all menopausal magnificent!
What fun!
Ten years ago, when we barely had a word to describe the fuckery of this life stage let alone perimenopause, it was silence, shame, taboo, stigma. Now: it’s best years of our life!
Menopause is shit. Menopause is amazing.
That’s long been my line.
So who am I to deny a celebrity living her best menopause?!
But what room for disintegration does this sheen and glitter leave?
Because that’s where I’m at right now: disintegration as in the breaking down of something into small particles or into its constituent elements, as in loss of unity or integrity by or as if by breaking into parts, as in the process of coming into pieces.
I’m coming into pieces, Hathshepsut.
What are those pieces? That’s the task ahead. Figuring that out.
What are my pieces? Why are they coming apart? Will I put them together again? Humpty Dumpty: let’s talk!
Seriously though, and the process of coming into pieces is utterly serious: is this what growing up is all about? Falling apart so that you can start again?
I feel like I’ve been given a most challenging gift. Some families have diabetes, some have high blood pressure, others cardiovascular issues. Mine has mental health challenges.
And depression has been a patient friend. It has watched me hop, skip, and jump onto planes as if I could outrun it. It waited for me to look back, knowing that I would, knowing that I knew it was there all along. “I was looking back to see you looking back at me to see me looking back at you,” to appropriate Massive Attack.
It is a friend, I know, because depression is not the enemy here to fell me but the comrade by my side, as I disintegrate so that I can become who I am meant to be.
We are the ones we have been waiting for, Hatshepsut. June Jordan always had words for us.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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