Real Help for Post-Menopausal Blues and Blahs, Part Four.

While there are plenty of web articles and videos proclaiming the glories of being a woman over fifty, many of us belonging to that demographic know that “glorious” is the last way we’d describe the years following menopause. Most women experience some challenges for a certain period of time; many experience many challenges, both physical and mental. And that’s regardless of how healthy our lifestyle is.

I wrote this series to offer tips on how you might alleviate those challenges, because I’ve gone through many and understand how miserable this period of life can be. If you have not yet seen my other three articles in the series, be sure to read over those, as well. 

Click here to read the very first, and most important, tip.

Click here to read tips two through four. 

Click here to read tips five, six and seven.

And remember that these articles are merely intended to inform and encourage, not to prescribe treatment or make any guarantees.

 Tip #8: Nourish your emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs.

Periods of low mood will come, even if you’re not sensitive to the atmospheric changes as I discussed in the previous article, and there’s no better way to ameliorate the impact of those moods than to regularly engage in practices to uplift your mind and spirit when you’re feeling well. Just as you can decrease the chances of getting laid out by a virus by eating a healthy diet and staying hydrated when you’re not sick, you can prevent a bad mood from sending you into a downward spiral by nourishing the mental and spiritual side of yourself when you’re in a good mood.

To that end, there are a variety of simple activities that anyone can engage in. The most important is one you’ve heard a million times before, but if you’re like a lot of women, you need to hear it a million and one times for it to sink in:

**Take time for yourself.

Unless you have full custody of grandchildren, or are a foster parent, your children are either teenagers or adults. Take advantage of that freedom. Don’t let your job usurp the time that you used to have to focus on your children. In fifteen-minute or thirty-minute bites, carve out a total of thirty to sixty minutes a day when you are doing something by yourself, with no other goal other than to relax. Hobby time and meditation time are separate; with this time, you drink a cup of hot tea and indulge in a novel. You light a few candles, put on some relaxing music, and soak in a warm bath. You lie down and take a nap. You put on some classical music and lie down. You take a slow stroll around a park or flower garden. You sit outside, back to the sun, and tune into the sounds of nature. You do some gentle stretches to the sound of relaxing music.

When I say, “take time to yourself,” I exclude any screen-related activity. They are stimulating, not relaxing, even if all you’re doing is staring at a video of ducks swimming on a pond. If you’re thinking, “But if I spend thirty minutes a day doing nothing, when will I have time to scroll through social media? I won’t have as much time for my Netflix binge?”

Exactly. And you will be the less stressed and the happier for it.

Following are other ideas on how to keep your soul and spirit nourished. You will find nothing original there, but perhaps you will be encouraged to begin a new activity or resume one that you’ve dropped simply by seeing it.

**Practice awareness.

This relaxation exercise helps you to stay in the moment more often when you’re going about your day. Some might call what I’m about to describe, “meditation,” but as there are various ways of meditating, I believe it more precise to name it as I have.

You start by sitting in a comfortable chair. Choose the standard seated position, with both feet on the floor, so you don’t risk becoming distracted with cramped muscles or developing pins and needles in your feet. Then, with your eyes open, choose one thing in the room to focus on. Study how it looks, its color, its texture, its size, any details that might make it special or decorative or unique. If you’re close enough, you can touch it or hold it and get a sense of how it feels. As you do this, you will have random thoughts that probably have nothing to do with the object come up. When they do, take a mental step away from them and double down on your focus.

After doing this for a minute or two, close your eyes and focus on the non-visual sensations around you. You might focus on one of your fingers, hands, or feet. Picture it with your mind’s eye, and try to remember its details. Aside from that, think about what you can smell or hear in the moment. Let the various sensations engulf you, and whenever a stray thought about either the past or the future (regret, fear, worry) pops up, mentally step away from it and let it pass by.

Learning to be aware in every moment helps keep you grounded, thus preventing anxiety and depression. It’s scientifically proven to increase serotonin levels, producing feelings of happiness. Full disclosure: I’m not anywhere near being aware every single moment. However, just getting in the habit of doing so for a few minutes every hour has done a lot for my mental well-being.

Sorry, didn’t mean to get quite so verbose on that soul-spirit nourishment idea. Here are a few more.

• Make time to pray every day.
• Speak to a therapist; or, if that’s out of your budget, speak to a friend who’s an empathetic listener a few times a month.
• Stay connected to the people who matter to you.
• Read inspirational books and blogs; watch inspirational videos.
• Learn to cast down negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts. See my free book, So Long, Stress! for more detail.
• Avoid consuming the news, in every format. There’s a reason that the apostle Paul commanded us to lead quiet lives and to mind our own business.
• Establish a calming morning routine to start the day. Perhaps it’s a cup of herbal tea while you read edifying literature or listen to classical music. Perhaps it’s a stroll around the block, during which you practice awareness. Maybe you take a shower, write in your journal, and do some gentle stretching. Unless you’re fostering young children, one of the benefits of hitting age fifty is that you have a lot more flexibility as to how you begin your day. Harness that flexibility to the benefit of your psychological and spiritual life.
• Walk away from toxic relationships.
• Don’t allow yourself to be overstimulated. This might mean saying “no” to some of your social invitations, or disciplining yourself to stop watching horror flicks or reading psychological thrillers.
• Mentally repeat affirmations throughout the day.

The above list is far from comprehensive. Try some of those ideas, and/or use them as a springboard to come up with your own methods that will help you to keep a positive perspective on life.

Tip #9: Chat with other menopausal women.

It’s one thing to know about the various menopausal symptoms and to get vague suggestions as to how to alleviate them. It’s another to communicate with women who are experiencing the same thing you are.

Back when I was worrying over every new weird thing that cropped up in my body, I learned to stop clicking on generic health sites. Instead, I would add “menopause forums” into whatever term I was searching. Within minutes, I would find that there have been women my age suffering much more than I ever did (diet and supplements help, ladies!). More importantly, I would stop feeling as though I were the only person on earth going through the physical challenge.

Join a Facebook group for post-menopausal women. Or a menopause thread on Reddit. Or an old-fashioned forum, if there’s one around that’s still active. Subscribe to YouTube channels run by post-menopausal women, and connect with the other women sharing their experiences in the comment section. Besides the first and last tip in this series of articles for improving your post-menopausal life, this is probably the one that will help you the most.

Tip #10: Don’t beat yourself up.

Despite your best efforts, there will be days when you indulge in unhealthy comfort food, binge on Hallmark romance movies, lounge around in the house in your sweats or P.J.s feeling aimless, get upset over nothing, sleep in for an ungodly amount of time – and this may last for days on end.

But it won’t last forever, and when you finally pull out of it, you will be tempted to beat yourself up over all the time you wasted, the regression you made with your health goals, the spouting of hurtful words you didn’t really mean, and so on.

Don’t.

In my experience, the latter years of perimenopause and the early years of menopause can be the most challenging time of a woman’s life, and is, at the very least, one of the most challenging times. Even with HRT, proper diet, and stress-reduction rituals, you can’t always control what your body does regarding hormone production and the aging process, and sometimes the best you can do – and I mean this with all the gravity I can put into the written word – is not take your own life.

Of course, if your mental state has sunken that low, you should immediately seek help. But sometimes, just getting out of bed and going through the necessary motions to survive the day is the best you can do. And when that happens, laud yourself for having done the bare necessities, rather than punish yourself for not having done more. Remind yourself that what you’re experiencing now is only temporary. This, too, shall pass. And however cliché it may sound, tomorrow is another day. A day to start fresh.

On those days when everything looks brighter and you feel you’ve reached a summit, take advantage of it. Get something crossed off your bucket list. Get ahead of yourself in your new online business. Reach out to a friend or family member and make concrete plans to visit. Immerse yourself in your hobbies.

Yes, life after fifty can be great. But not always. I hope that, through this series, you now have tools that will help more days be closer to great than otherwise would have been.

Real Help for Post-Menopausal Blues and Blahs, Part Three

This article is the third in a four-part series where I encourage my fellow post-menopausal women to work their way through the difficulties that this season of life often brings. Click here to read the first part, as well as my disclaimer; click here to read the second part.

Let’s continue on with my fifth tip…

Tip #5: Move every day.

Fatigue and low moods have a way of turning a previously active person into a couch potato. I know I’m not the only woman in her fifties (even forties) who used to juggle several projects at one time, plus consistently engage in her hobbies, but many days now can barely motivate herself to do the dishes or sweep the floor. However, if you laze about in bed or on the sofa for days on end, the result will be deeper fatigue and more intense low moods. 

On the days you feel least like moving, you need to make yourself move.

Notice I say “move” and not “exercise.” You’re already having enough trouble enjoying life; you don’t need anyone adding to that trouble by suggesting that you go out and intentionally do something that feels like drudgery. Because that’s exactly what exercise is when you’re chronically fatigued.

Instead, get up and get moving for five to fifteen minutes, several times a day. Here are some ideas to try:

• Take a relaxed power walk. That is, stroll for three to four minutes, then power walk for a minute or two, then repeat a couple more times.
• Turn on your favorite music and dance. Move your body as much as it can be safely moved, given your fitness and flexibility levels.
• Do a bubble stretch. Stand in a space where you have plenty of empty space around you. Pretend that you are inside of a giant bubble. Reach, bend, stretch your arms and legs, in whatever combination possible, in an attempt to touch all sides of that bubble.
• Take a dance-exercise class with a friend. Because when you do it with a friend, it’s a lot more dance and a lot less exercise.
• Go swimming.
• Take a hike, if you’re in an area where that’s possible.
• Jump rope.
• Fire your maid and clean your house yourself. (Hint: it’s not work if you’re playing instrumental hip-hop and making up your own lyrics to it.)
• Rebound. (Not the dating kind, the mini-trampoline kind.)
• Bicycle. 

An important note regarding swimming and bicycling: both activities have a negative effect on bone mass, so if you engage in them, to prevent osteoporosis you also need to engage in activities that have your feet hitting the ground.

Those are a few basic movement ideas that most people can manage. Remember, it doesn’t take a lot of movement to lift your mood and boost your energy, just consistency. You might even lose a few pounds in the process.

Tip #6: Get outside.

If you choose a movement activity that gets you out in nature and the sun, so much the better. However, don’t limit your outside time to only the movement time. Even if you live in an apartment in a downtown surrounded by skyscrapers, getting direct exposure to the sunlight promotes both vitamin D and serotonin production. Vitamin D is essential for proper immune system function and bone strength, and serotonin is essential not only for emotional and mood balance, but also hormone production.

The more nature with which you can surround yourself, the better. A sidewalk lined with trees is better than blocks and blocks of sheer concrete and asphalt. A park is better than the tree-lined sidewalk. A park with a trail going around a body of water, surrounded on all sides with woods, is even better.

Whether you believe in a literal Garden of Eden, or simply cling to the fact that the original humans thrived outdoors for an unknown number of years, you can’t escape the truth that nature is in our genes. Only relatively recently in human history have people begun shutting themselves up inside for ninety percent and more of their waking hours, and it has taken a toll both physiologically and psychologically. I would hazard a guess that if it were possible and feasible, if people stuck in cubicles and on factory lines all day could do that same work outside, they would enjoy even the most mundane and boring jobs, and work-related stress and illness would become things of the past.

There’s a reason that taking a walk through a meadow or woods has a calming, grounding effect. There’s a reason we enjoy the sounds of birds and leaves rustling in the breeze, the sight of flowers and towering, green trees, the scent of clean air after a storm.

The reason? The outdoors is where we have spent most of our existence. Nature is a part of us. We are part of nature.

Try to get outside, weather permitting, for at least an hour every day. It will do wonders for your perspective on life, and miracles on your hormone-induced mood swings.

Tip #7: Pay attention to the sky.

When I was teaching elementary school, it didn’t take me long to realize that the coming of both the full moon and the new moon affected not only my mood, but the mood of many of my students. I noticed that the two worst days of the month were the days before each moon phase. Add in rain to those days, and I knew that I would hardly get any teaching done. Especially after lunch.

So it was with much surprise and skepticism that, sometime in the early 2010s, I got online to look up the effects of the full moon on humans and found article after article where scientists scoffed at the notion… even though for centuries medical professionals have observed more accidents happening during the full moon than at any other time of the month. Likely as not, back in the early 2000s scientists were also scoffing at the notion that the weather affected people’s brain chemistry, but I didn’t look that up at the time.

Fast forward to today, and you find the exact opposite. Scientists are only too happy to expound on the reason that the full and new moons cause both undesirable mental and physical symptoms… and with an authority that implies that the scientific community have believed it all along!

The short explanation is this: when the moon is full or new – including a few days before and after the exact date – its gravitational pull on Earth is at its strongest, actually causing the Earth to get a little squished. This “squishing” can cause internal swelling of various tissue in animals (I tend to experience it in my digestive tract) as well as upset brain chemistry balance.

I was in late perimenopause before I realized that my menstrual cycle was calibrated with the lunar cycle. And since hitting menopause, I’ve continued to experience some of the same symptoms on a monthly basis as I did when I was in my child-bearing years. It turns out that I hadn’t been bothered nearly as much by P.M.S. as I had by the moon phases!

Changes in the weather – the barometric pressure dropping, east wind, north wind – have similar effects on the human body, leading to physical discomfort, emotional instability, and/or fatigue. One article I found stated that the west wind can actually cause an increase in serotonin levels, to the extent that if your levels of the happy brain chemical are already optimal, you can end up feeling anything between irritability and rage. With serotonin, apparently, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

My point in all this is that if you suffer from mood swings and/or chronic anxiety or depression, start paying attention to the weather and the calendar. If you discover that you consistently experience negative symptoms when the weather changes or within a few days of a new or full moon, then you can plan your life around that sensitivity. For example, I try to plan long road trips in between the full and new moon so that my family and I don’t end up snapping at each other and arguing while on the road. I know I don’t have to worry about my husband’s short-term twice-a-month depression, because it occurs right before the full moon and the new moon.

 During the same time periods, I have to fight against mental downward spirals and work hard to keep from saying anything hurtful to my husband or son. I’ve learned, in addition, that when I feel like every bite of food I swallow is swelling up like a balloon inside my stomach, it’s almost always due to the moon or the weather and is therefore a temporary problem. The solution is to eat less on those days, or to spread out my eating even more than I already do. Knowing this keeps me from getting frustrated with my body and convincing myself there must be something wrong, or that I’ll never be able to enjoy eating again.

When you know that you’re sensitive to certain atmospheric changes, you can prepare yourself ahead of time. This will go far to reduce stress and enhance your general sense of well-being.

I hope this article has been helpful for you. If it has, be sure not to miss the last post in this series in order to catch my last three tips on making your post-menopausal years more comfortable and more fulfilling than they might otherwise be.

Real Help for Post Menopausal Blues and Blahs, Part Two

 

This is the second part of my four-part series entitled, “Real Help for Post Menopausal Blues and Blahs,” where I offer my fellow fifty-plus women tips on how to push through the icky parts of entering this stage of our lives. If you haven’t read the first article in the series, I urge you to do so, as it provides the most critical piece of advice. Click here to read it, and also to read the disclaimer at the bottom because I am not offering medical advice here.

That said, let’s get onto a couple more ideas on how to make the journey into menopause more comfortable.

Tip #2: Learn to live in the moment.

During the past couple of years, I’ve developed a bad habit of looking into a mirror and envisioning – with dread and disgust – what I will look like twenty years in the future. I do something that causes my stomach to slide up into the hiatus of my diaphragm (click here if you don’t know what a hiatal hernia is), and I start envisioning a life where I can no longer do any exercise, can no longer bend over even just once a day to pick something up off the floor, without sending the entirety of my stomach into my chest cavity.

I have discomfort upon eating the first pint of my morning smoothie, and assume that I’m going to feel increasingly miserable throughout the day with every bite of food I take. I wake up one day feeling more tired than usual, a tiredness which only has grown worse by mid-morning, bringing lethargy and indifference to the world along with it, and I wonder if I’ll ever feel like living again.

You, too, have allowed your mind to dive into the ocean of worry, and we both know that it hasn’t made anything easier. Worrying only serves to exacerbate our current problems, because it focuses our thoughts onto the negative, causing a shift in perspective that makes everything look worse than it actually is.

There is one remedy for worry, and one only, and it’s not quoting “do not fear” Bible verses to yourself.

It’s living in the moment.

No, that’s not a New Age concept. It’s a healthy mind concept. It’s the only real way to experience God. Though God was with you in your past, He’s not there now. Though God holds your future in His hand, that’s not where He dwells.

He lives with you now. (Read more about that here. I also delve more deeply into it in an essay in my upcoming book, A Field Guide To Finding Yourself.)

Your spiritual beliefs notwithstanding, any psychologist worth their salt will tell you that it’s not healthy to set your mind in a time period that doesn’t exist. What’s past is past, and you can’t control the future. And if you’re suffering? If you live moment by moment, you can put up with a lot. You can walk through one moment feeling exhausted. Then the next. Then the next. If you can make it through this moment with the discomfort in your belly due to excessive gas – or excessive sensitivity to gas – you can make it through the next.

In this moment, you don’t have to try to be Superwoman. You just have to move through it the best you can. The same for the next moment, then the one that comes after.

When you slow your mind down and discipline yourself to focus on the here and now, you can find joy, peace, and contentment regardless of how you feel physically, because you are able to fully trust. Why? To trust is not to worry; therefore, to worry is not to trust. If you are living in the moment, you cannot worry, and by default, you are trusting.

Trusting that you can make it. Trusting that everything will turn out all right. Trusting that if you just do the best you can in this moment, you are being the person you were meant to be.

It’s with this trust that you gradually develop inner freedom, which helps you to have a positive perspective on life, which in turn makes you feel better, which in turn leads you to making changes and decisions that benefit you and those around you.

Tip #3: Tweak your diet.

Eating optimally and getting the right amount of certain nutrients go a long way to helping your body continue to produce estrogen and progesterone, thereby reducing – or eliminating altogether – the symptoms associated with menopause.

There is a lot of controversy about what constitutes a healthy diet, especially when it comes to the meat versus no meat question. Most of us can agree that a diet high in fruits and vegetables (I include legumes here) and low in or void of sweets and prepackaged snacks and meals is a good starting point. Dairy is inherently not a human food, and is best either to be avoided or to be eaten as a treat. The lion’s share of research on diet and health shows that keeping meat consumption low, or non-existent, is a predictor of long-term health when combined with a whole-foods diet (this includes only a sparse use of oil, whether for cooking or for dressing salads).

If you disagree with that, then at least do these three things.

First, cook your meat low and slow. This lowers the risk of the muscle-meat protein becoming denatured, which is how meat becomes toxic to the body.

Second, eat lean meats and/or organ meat.

Third, make sure you're consuming a cup or two of berries a day, plus at least five servings of vegetables, including one to two cups of a cabbage family vegetable (cauliflower, broccoli, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts), every day. The phytonutrients and fiber in these fruits and vegetables help to offset the potential negative effects of muscle meat and saturated fat in your body.

If you know you’re not eating healthy, try the one-week transformation plan. You can vary it however you like. The basic method is that on day one, you eat a whole foods, 100 percent plant-based breakfast. Day two, you keep to that breakfast and add a lunch along the same principle. Day three, all three meals are from whole foods, and you keep any meat down to three or four ounces once per day. Days four through seven, you continue eating whole-foods meals and work on eliminating junk-food snacks, or eliminating snacks altogether, and slowly adding in more fruits and vegetables.

The clincher for many post-menopausal women is that digestive issues can mean that healthy foods, even ones we’ve eaten all our lives, can suddenly cause gas and bloating. Or issues with our stools (not the kind you sit on!). If that’s you, try small amounts of new foods to see how your system does with them. For example, eat a quarter or a half cup quinoa or broccoli, rather than a full cup. Slowly increase the amounts of potentially problem foods to see if your system will acclimate to them. They may not, in which case, dial back and consume them in the small amount that doesn’t bother. Or, if you’re already eating similar foods that both you and your digestive track like better – say, kale instead of broccoli – stick with that other food. 

Be willing to experiment, and don’t get frustrated when you struggle to eat foods which the non-menopausal nutrition experts say are healthy and which “should” be part of your diet. Do the best you can, but understand that even doing that, you may still suffer some digestive discomfort.

Tip #4: Manage your nutrition.

In the ideal world, eating a whole-foods, mostly plant, nutrient dense diet would provide all the nutrition I need.

It doesn’t. Never has.

Is it because store-bought produce is a lot lower in nutrition than nutrition books and apps claim? Because the recommended daily values of vitamins and minerals is the bare minimum needed not to show signs of deficiency? Because I have a malabsorption problem?

Could be one or all of these. Based on what I’ve read, it seems that the recommended sixty milligrams of vitamin C per day is much lower than what most people actually need. I recently tried, for the second or third time, to give up my 600 milligrams of chelated magnesium supplement per day. According to nutrition apps, I get well over 100 percent of the mineral every day. Yet, I need at least an additional 400 milligrams in order to maintain emotional stability. Perhaps it’s because I have a neurodivergent brain, so I need more magnesium to encourage serotonin production.

Whatever the case, as a post-menopausal woman, you may find that getting a nutrient-dense diet and keeping your hormones at a healthy level aren’t enough to maintain a consistent sense of well-being. In that case, you may look into adding a few nutritional supplements to your daily regimen. Besides magnesium and vitamin C, many women over the age of fifty claim noticeable benefits from taking a B vitamin complex.

I discuss nutrition and diet in more depth in my free ebook, From Suffering to Singing. Click here to download it. And click here to read the third post in this series.

Real Help for Post-Menopause Blues and Blahs, Part One.

The other day, I did an online search for the term, “post menopause feel like I don’t have any purpose.” Or something like that. The results that came back were nothing short of irrelevant and abysmal. They were all pep talks about how great life after fifty is, because women supposedly suddenly have so much more freedom than they’ve ever had. They can jump into hobbies they’ve been yearning to try, travel the world, get involved with community events, re-ignite the romance in their marriage or, if they don’t currently have a spouse, start dating again.

I wonder what planet the writers of those articles are living on. Besides the fact that a lot of Gen-X women didn’t begin having children until their thirties, so that by the time they hit menopause, they still have teenagers in the house, many women in their fifties have to go to work. If they have a nest egg, even in conjunction with that of a husband, it’s nowhere near big enough to allow them to retire. No freedom there.

Second, many, many post-menopausal women are suffering physically due to The Change of Life. If nothing else, they’re tired all the time, and that’s even if they’re one of the few, the proud, the merrily able to get eight hours of sleep every night. When you’re fatigued, you do not feel as if you have any freedom. In a very real sense, you are enslaved to the tiredness. You can barely drag yourself out of bed just to perform your daily duties. You couldn’t care less about starting a new hobby, often don’t feel like working on any hobbies that you’ve held dear for a long time, and the mere idea of having to drive to the airport, fly to somewhere new, and navigate your way around an unfamiliar place exhausts you.

Constantly being tired leads to depression. Period, end of story. There’s no “can” about it. If you are chronically fatigued, you will get depressed.

(Before you continue reading, please read the disclaimer at the end of this article and agree to it. The disclaimer pertains to all four articles in this series. Thank you.)

A lot of neurotypical women suddenly develop sensory issues and short-term memory problems, and those of us who are neurodivergent find our sensitivities growing to uncomfortably intense levels and our short-term memory failing us more than ever. Digestive issues with no apparent organic root cause turn eating favorite healthy homemade meals into a literal pain, leading you to near panic when someone suggests they take you out to eat.

For some women, HRT resolves all of those problems. For many, it does not, and for many more, HRT is not an option either for financial reasons or because they know about the potential side effects and want to avoid them. You can only take medically prescribed HRT for so long, and as soon as you’re off of it, the unwanted symptoms return.

If you resonate with anything I’ve written above, if you’re a post-menopausal woman who is living with a continual low level of depression because you’re always tired, and/or health anxiety because of the strange and uncomfortable symptoms that keep cropping up out of nowhere, if you feel like you couldn’t find a purpose in life if someone paid you a billion dollars to do so, keep reading. I don’t promise to solve all of your problems in one fell swoop, but as a neurodivergent post-menopausal woman in her mid-fifties who went through perimenopause hell and continues to struggle with feeling content about life in general, and her body in specific, I think I can give you more realistic help for navigating this period of your life than what I’ve been able to find online.

This article is the first in a four-art series of tips on how to feel better after menopause (they’ll work for the perimenopause years, as well), so be sure to click on the link to each subsequent article at the end of each post.

The most important tip of all…

I will begin and end the first article in the series with the most critical tip I have for starting your journey toward feeling more balanced and healthy after menopause, and that is this: Get your hormone levels tested.

Likely as not, the root cause for most of your physiological problems is being low in one or more of the major reproductive hormones, or having an imbalance of them. Ideally, a hormone test would include estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Including a vitamin D serum test might be helpful, as well, because low levels of vitamin D not only equate to a weakened immune system (which post-menopausal women have by default), but also to greater fatigue.

Don’t be like me and assume that you know where you’re imbalances lie and try to fix them with over-the-counter remedies. For a long time, I was convinced that I was low in both progesterone and estrogen, and was therefore shocked when I finally broke down and had a test done and discovered that my estrogen levels were actually normal.

The health testing website EverlyWell will send you a saliva sample test that you send back to them, and you pay only for the testing, not for clinic overhead. However, their menopause test does not include testosterone.

Once you have your results, you can make better decisions about how to go about remedying your hormone imbalances. Progesterone cream is easily available online and at health food stores, and I tell you from personal experience that it works. If you’re low in estrogen, eating more plant foods and/or using estradiol cream can help. Of course, if you have a gynecologist who does the testing and you want to try HRT, your doctor will prescribe the balance that you need.

Increasing the levels of reproductive hormones in your body usually goes a long way to alleviating symptoms. But whether you take a pill, use a cream, or drastically change your diet, it will likely be weeks before you notice the hot flashes dissipating, the mood swings calming, the random aches and pains evaporating. And even when the hormone therapy fully kicks in, it won’t keep your body from aging. There will still be obvious signs that you’re not thirty anymore, signs that will gradually grow in both number and intensity.

Thus, the remaining tips in upcoming posts are ones to help you slow down the aging process as much as you can, as well as to help you navigate life so that you can feel contented and fulfilled despite any persistent and lingering menopausal symptoms.

Don’t miss them. Click here to read the second article in this series.

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DISCLAIMER: This series of articles is NOT intended to offer medical advice or treatment. Rather, I want to share what I've learned, and am learning, from my own experience. I don't guarantee that any of the tips in any of the articles will impact your life in a positive way, and you and you alone are responsible for what you do with the information found within the articles.

A Visitation, AKA, Necessary Encouragement for Anyone Who Is Struggling.

I’ve been going through some stuff lately. The worst has been the annual depression produced by a combination of the constant drop in barometric pressure, and the gloominess of experiencing several consecutive days of gray skies. Spring may be some people’s favorite season, but where I live, and for my Highly Sensitive Autistic self, the season is a struggle to get through.

Then there are a couple of chronic health challenges I’ve been dealing with (nothing life-threatening, just annoying at best and disconcerting at worst), one of which I recently exacerbated by making a wrong and non-reversible treatment decision about it.

[UPDATE August 2024 - That "wrong" decision, a tooth extraction to eliminate an otherwise untreatable gum infection, turned out to be the perfect decision.]

Anyone over the age of thirty, especially those over the age of forty who are beginning to see and feel the effects of aging, can relate. No one has the perfect Instagram life, and sometimes, perhaps much more often than we care to admit to anyone beyond our close circle, life is downright depressing. Instead of a light at the end of a tunnel, all we can see is a black hole. Every cloud we look at is lined with tar, any half-full glass we come across, we accidentally knock to the floor and break.

But no matter what you’re going through, there is hope. Last night, God reminded me of that in a dream, and if you’re starting to navigate away from this article because I said the “G” word, then I guess you haven’t hit rock bottom yet. You still have enough strength left in you to exercise your pride, enough strength to cling to an impossible belief, the belief that everything came from nothing. 

The words that follow are not meant to convince the illogical, deceived unbeliever, but believers who wrestle against thoughts that God must not love them, as well as unbelievers who want to believe, but can’t understand how a loving God can allow bad things to happen. If you don’t belong to one of those two groups, goodbye.

For the rest of you…

Last night, for the first time in all of my fifty-four years (that I am aware), Yeshua showed up in one of my dreams. The setting was some sort of dystopia, in which innocent citizens were being forced to help their evil conquerors to fight their war. I knew no specific details in the dream, but everyone around me was afraid, and there was a sense that we, the innocents, were eventually going to be killed, one way or the other.

Then, Yeshua walked onto the scene, from behind a large stone wall, I think, or perhaps He appeared from behind a group of people. I and two others, the only two other believers there besides me, recognized Him instantly. At the same time, we understood that we were not to reveal Who He was. We also understood that the enemy would not have the final say. We knew Yeshua had come to help us fight against them.

He looked nothing like any of the actors I’ve ever seen portray Yeshua, whether in movies or in music videos. He was not handsome. He was on the short side for a man, maybe a couple of inches taller than my five-foot-three height, had a fit physique, dark tan skin, and wavy, dark brown hair that fell to His shoulders. He had brown eyes, a large nose, and a round chin.

No, unlike the men I’ve seen throughout the years portraying Jesus, the Man of my dreams would never be invited to model for the cover of a romance novel.

Nevertheless, He was beautiful in a way I can’t explain. Love glimmered in His eyes, and He had a smile that communicated gentleness, kindness, compassion, and trustworthiness.

Though He came out to mingle with the innocents, He would occasionally duck away when certain of the enemy’s leaders appeared. They knew Him, and He did not want to alert them of His presence.

At one point, He stood right next to me, and I leaned against Him, both needing to feel His reality and trying to express my gratitude for His being there. 

Sometimes, in my vivid dreams people speak coherent words. Other times, the communication is telepathic, and it was so in this dream. Of course, in this case you might say that I was praying silently, and that the Holy Spirit gave me Yeshua’s answer as He thought it.

Anyway, of all the things I might have asked Him given our dire situation, I decided, for some crazy reason, to ask Him about gardening.

Or, maybe not so crazy. In real life, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with gardening. I enjoy working outside, love nurturing plants and watching them grow. But gardening is a great challenge where we live.

First of all, springs and summers are so humid that many of the native plants, including trees, develop fungal disease. Most garden crops don’t have a chance at thriving for the entire season.

Second, the soil here is mostly broken-down sandstone. In order to grow anything, you either have to spend years amending the native soil, or build raised beds and fill them with potting mix (I’ve done a combination of both).

Finally, I have to water the garden by hand (too long of an explanation as to why), and when it’s ninety degrees with seventy percent humidity by ten o’clock in the morning, the chore takes all the romance out of growing your own food. Not to mention all of the energy from the rest of your day.

My point: for me, growing vegetables is a good representative of all the ongoing struggles in my life.

I don’t remember what I specifically asked about gardening. I think it was along the lines of, how can I produce more with less work? Or maybe it was, should I even bother trying to continue growing vegetables? Whatever the question, it was filled with frustration. A sense of, is all that work even worth it?

Neither do I remember His specific answer. It was, as is God’s voice in one’s waking hours, more of an impression, and the impression was this: enjoy the process. Flow with the process. Learn from the process.

In other words, relax and trust. The very two life issues I struggle with the most.

BUT. I can do both, if I would just remember that Yeshua is always with me.

As with most dreams, not long after I woke up, the dream’s images and details began to fade. I didn’t wake up with a profound sense of peace, or excitement over having been in my Savior’s presence. But what I did wake up with, the one impression that has not faded, is that no matter how I feel, no matter what I’m going through – especially when I feel trapped by all the negative aspects of life, like they and they alone are what dictate my path – Yeshua is right beside me.

There was another impression, too, one which religious people will fail to accept.

My sins are forgiven, so I can stop feeling guilty over every wrong thought, word, and action that emanates from my being. I can stop beating myself up over not being perfect. Yeshua is beside me, because He wants to be in my company. No matter what.

While this is far from the first time in my life that I’ve heard something similar, it was the first time that I felt it coming straight from the Throne Room itself. How many times have I told my husband, “If only Yeshua would just come down and tell me XYZ…”

He finally did.

You might think, “It was just a dream.” Well, God speaks through dreams. This happens to be the first –and probably only – time that He has spoken to me so directly, without making me wade through a sea of symbols to interpret.

This dream counts as a visitation from my Lord.

If you’re a believer and have been struggling with God’s love, that word is for you. Yeshua said that in this life we will have tribulations – including gardens that won’t work, including messes of our own making – but to be of good cheer, for He has overcome them.

If you are not yet a believer, because you see the evil around you and wonder how a loving God can allow it, what you need to know is that God has not allowed any of it.

We have.

We, the human beings whom He commanded to have dominion over the earth, have taken that dominion and abused it with our greed, selfishness, lust, fear, and pride.

God will one day set all things right. The question is, while you walk through all the not-right things, do you want to continue alone, or do you want a friend – a friend who has the power to heal, to grant wisdom, to protect, to comfort, to guide, to give strength – to walk with you?

Writer’s Demand Avoidance; Or, Run Your Own Race

I recently discovered yet another psychiatric disorder. I call it “Writer’s Demand Avoidance,” the primary symptom of which is being unable to compose the usual type of writing which one is accustomed to, for a period of at least fourteen consecutive days. Upon trying to force oneself to work on a piece of writing, anger, anxiety, and writer’s block ensue, leading to greater frustration and feelings of Author Inadequacy.

The primary cause of this distressful disorder?

Deciding on a minimum daily word count, which minimum exceeds the prior minimum by at least 800 words and leads to resentment toward other daily tasks and hobbies because the increase word count also means decreased time available for non-writing activities.

I’m being facetious, and I know that deciding to stick to writing 3200 words per day this past mid-winter wasn’t the real reason for my novel writing shutdown for the past two months, but it didn’t help.

In the meantime, I worked on a self-help book. But before I started it, and while I was in between chapters of that book, whenever I tried to restart the fourth novel in my latest Christmas romance series, it just.

Wouldn’t.

Go.

Anywhere.

I had a similar trouble with the third book in the series, though I didn’t have in my head at the time to write more a day than my usual 2,000 words. So I was determined to write this final novel. If I could break through the demand avoidance with that one, I could do the same with this one.

I finished the self-help book, got a skeletal outline going for the romance novel… and threw the 3200 words per day idea out the window.

I’ve been steadily writing 2,000 words, and only 2,000 words, every day, even when I’ve felt like I could write more, for the over a week now. For the first time in a long time, writing fiction is fun. I’m not pressuring myself with a deadline. And, I have a lot of free time for chores, hobbies, and enjoying the outdoors.

I’m also finding that limiting my daily word count helps to keep the story momentum going. I don’t run out of steam.

Long story short? I believe pressuring myself with a high daily word count was causing novel writing burnout even though I was spacing the composition of said novels a good deal apart, as I’d promised I would do in this article. Why did I do it in the first place?, you might ask.

Because of having heard, over the past several years, other self-published fiction authors talk about how they whip out five thousand and more words per day. Without the help of AI, I might add.

I also might add that these authors usually don’t have any children, often are single, are younger than forty-five years old, and – here’s the clincher – if they don’t write that next book, they’ll have trouble paying the light bill.

I have no need to try to write a book a month. Or a book every two months. I write because the process fills a place in my soul, and makes me feel like I’m contributing something good to the world.

As long, that is, as I’m writing on my own terms, and not somebody else’s.

As I was reminded in an e-mail I received from Malory Ford, another Christian romance author, I need to run my own race, not somebody else’s.

Should I Purchase Property On Eagle’s Nest Ranch?

“Should I buy property on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma?”

If you’re asking this question, you’re one of its few intelligent prospective land buyers. As someone who has been living in the area for over ten years, I have some thoughts for you that I hope will help you make your decision.

Whitetail Properties aren’t the conservationists they claim to be.

Eagle’s Nest Ranch is being developed and sold by the rural Real Estate company called Whitetail Properties. On their website, they claim to be conservationists. However, by the time they finish preparing their three housing developments, they will have clear-cut several hundred acres of forest from what used to be a beautiful, pristine mountainside. They have destroyed the homes of countless birds and the habitat of deer and other animal species. 

If you purchase a tract on one of their “ranches,” there will be few to no trees on your property, or separating your property from the others. The Powers That Be at Whitetail Properties are, in effect, attempting to build suburban subdivisions in the middle of a forest.

Cutting to the chase, Whitetail Properties is run by people of dubitable moral character who care much more about the money they can suck out of people than about nature and conservation. When my husband and I bought our property in 2011, we had to sign a contract agreeing, among other things, that we would not cut down more than twenty percent of the trees on our property. 

Given that the developer had divided the area into tracts that were no smaller than five acres, and that the people purchasing the properties wanted to live in the woods – which is as it should be for anyone buying property inside of a forest – most of the forest in our mountain development remains intact, despite the fact that well over half of the owners have built houses, even gardens, here. The developer who sold us the property where we live has more conservationism in his pinky finger than the entirety of the staff on Whitetail Properties, or the managers of Eagle’s Nest Ranch.

The Owner/Managers of Eagle's Nest Ranch is inconsiderate of their neighbors.

If you go to the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website, one of their bragging points is the roads they have built through the mountains (again, a lot of loss of forest and wildlife). The material to build those roads did not come out of thin air. They had to get it from somewhere.

You’d like to think that they went to a pre-existing quarry and bought gravel. You’d think wrong. What they did was to destroy over five acres of forest in order to harvest the shale underneath.

But not just any five acres. The forest they eliminated, the land which they turned into a moonscape, is in the direct view of the two non-Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties which butt up against ENR. The quarry is ugly, and in the future should the current owners of those properties try to sell, the quarry will make it more difficult and possibly lower the land value.

Oh, and did I tell you that they decided it would be clever to burn the trees they were killing right next to the lower non-ENR property, and that they ended up burning to death several trees on that neighboring property? They never offered compensation to the owners of that property to cover the loss. The owners would likely have to file a lawsuit to get any.

There is also concern among the low-income residents of Clayton, the town nearest Eagle’s Nest Ranch, that their property taxes will increase considerably thanks to Whitetail Properties. If that happens, many people might be displaced.

They charge exorbitant prices.

Whitetail Properties is known for overpricing properties to excess. One tract that is one and a half acres on Eagle’s Nest Ranch is priced at over $227,000. Even given the cost of bringing in utilities, this is way overpriced. The market value of mountain land in this area right now is around $20,000 per acre.

If you purchase from Whitetail Properties, you will be ripped off. And that’s before the ridiculous post-CoVid19 cost of building a moderately-sized cabin.

Speaking of market value…

The housing bubble has arrived twelve years late!

We were living in the Dallas area when the housing bubble burst happened back in the early 2000’s, and it missed Texas – and I think Oklahoma – completely.

I’m no economist, but it seems to have arrived here now. When we bought our southeast Oklahoma property in 2011, we paid $3800 an acre for a piece of the beautiful mountains. Now, you’re lucky if you can find anyone asking for under $20,000 an acre. While housing prices in Dallas haven’t gone up by five times since 2011, they have more than doubled.

Yes, some of this can be blamed on Biden’s acceleration of inflation. But not all of it.

Let me give you a hint about southeast Oklahoma land: it ain’t worth $20,000 an acre. You can’t grow food unless you spend a lot of money amending the soil, or buying a lot of bagged potting mix – and then most of what you might try to grow is likely to die of some sort of fungus. If you want land for hunting, well, how many deer are there going to be with developers creating small towns in the mountains? Besides, with the current cost of land being what it is, you’d save money staying where you are and buying deer meat for the rest of your life!

If you purchase a tract from Eagle’s Nest Ranch – or anywhere in southeast Oklahoma, really – then decide to sell in a few years, there’s a chance that you will lose money.

“But it’s beautiful country! The view is worth it!”

Trust me. If you’re thinking about leaving the city because you’re tired of seeing a brick wall every time you look out a window, you may eventually get tired of the forest view, too. Even if you wouldn’t, you need to decide if a “view” is really worth overpaying in a market that might be about to burst. You may be better off saving your money to go on more vacations.

Especially when you realize the truth of the next issue…

Southeast Oklahoma don’t got no shopping malls or Whole Foods.

Another boasting point on the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website is that the properties are “only” two and a half hours from either the north Dallas area or Tulsa. That’s two and a half hours to get to a decent department store. Two and a half hours to a Whole Foods. An entire day, and five hours sitting in a car, just to buy groceries or a new, quality dress.

“I don’t shop at Whole Foods. I’ll just go to the local grocery store.”

All right, then you can come to my house and tell me if they have stopped selling wilting lettuce, carrots that have begun to rot in the bag, and moldy grapes.

Yes, it’s that bad.

The closest place that sells decent groceries is either in Antlers or Wilburton, both nearly an hour’s drive from Eagle’s Nest Ranch. Walmart is about the same distance in the city of Mcalester, but take it from me, if you’re used to a chain as even as humble as a Tom Thumb or Kroger, Walmart produce and frozen foods won’t cut it.

Oh, and by the way, grocery delivery services don’t come this far out, and the nearest Azure Standard pickup is over an hour away, and run by a family who will try to give you religious tracts that tell you you’re not saved unless you’re following the laws in the Old Testament book of Leviticus.

McAlester does, thank heavens, have a Lowes, but if you love Target or prefer Home Depot, they are at least an hour and a half away.

Clayton has one beauty salon, a variety store that charges up to five times the market value for the items that they sell, and a hardware store whose tools aren’t always the best quality. If you want to eat out at a halfway decent place, again, we’re talking an hour and a half drive to Paris, Texas.

Don’t care about that? You say you’ll just order everything from Amazon and eat homemade meals? Fine, that’s what we do, too. But think about this: how long do you think those shale-based roads are going to last with UPS trucks going over them every day to deliver to everyone in your treeless mountain subdivision?

Besides, UPS won’t deliver handymen or A/C servicemen to your door. And when you finally find one who will come all the way out there, you may wait a week or more to get whatever repairs you need done, done. That goes for plumbers and any other contracting service, as well.

Speaking of UPS and roads…

The county won’t melt the ice and snow for you.

We usually have a decent sleet, ice, or snowstorm every winter. The higher up you live in the mountains, the colder it is, and the longer it takes for everything to melt – several days longer than it does in the DFW metroplex.

And the county isn’t going to give the suckers residents on Eagle’s Nest Ranch special treatment. When you live in these mountains, it’s possible to be stuck on your property for several days after a winter storm.

Secluded? Not so much.

The Eagle’s Nest Ranch website promises seclusion for its new owners. However, none of the tracts are much larger than two acres. You can only get so far away from your neighbor on two acres.

We live on five acres, yet we can see two of our neighbor’s homes from our house. That’s even with all of us having obeyed another one of the developer’s agreements on the sales contract, to build a house not closer than 100 feet to any boundary, and with having thick copses of trees between us. And I’m guessing Whitetail Properties isn’t making anyone agree to any such thing. You might build your house on what you believe to be the best site on your acreage, and your new neighbor could come along and build their house right across from yours.

Also, how “secluded” is a 48-tract development, with all the tracts being small and hitting up against each other, with no trees in sight? 

Here’s another gem the Whitetail Realtors won’t tell you about, even if they know about it: There is an ammunition dump just outside of McAlester, on the south side. Two to five times a month, they blow up ammunition underground. We can not only hear the explosions, but sometimes feel the tremors which the detonation causes. Eagle’s Nest Ranch is located a little closer to that reverberation than where me and my husband live.

The locals already don’t like you.

No one around here likes Whitetail Properties. Some still aren’t happy, ten years after the fact, that people like me and my husband bought mountain land, though we’ve done our best to maintain the natural environment. I can only imagine the hostility that owners of Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties are going to face by the Clayton, Oklahoma locals. They want their small town, rural community environment to stay that way, not turn into a suburb full of wealthy people who don’t care about preserving the land.

Then there are these other issues...

If you live in the DFW area and suffer from allergies, they'll be five times worse in southeast Oklahoma. Why? Two reasons. First, higher humidity. Second, trees. A lot of them. Assuming Whitetail Properties doesn't eventually cut them all down.

Lots of trees plus high humidity equals allergy symptoms for much of, if not most of, the year.

For post-menopausal women, it's even worse. 

Note the higher humidity I just mentioned. If you don't like the humidity during the summer in Dallas, you'll hate it in southeast Oklahoma.

And if you've never lived in the South before, and are thinking, "I don't have allergies! I'll be fine!", ask any Northern ex-pat and you'll discover that we ALL developed allergy problems after moving to the South. If you want to move to a warmer clime, try Tennessee or some other semi-southern state that reports low allergies.

The ball is in your court.

You now know that Whitetail Properties is not as ethical a company as they claim to be. You know that if you purchase a tract on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma, you will be supporting the destruction of natural habitat, including the cruel death and displacement of innocent animals.

In addition, having to drive five hours round-trip to experience culture – concerts, orchestras, community theater – gets old fast.

You need to decide: will you take the moral high ground, or not? Do you really want to be a part of the systemic, ongoing bulldozing of nature and habitat, when you already live in a perfectly good house with all the amenities that you could ever want within easy reach?

Living in the country, even one with a view of mountain forests, is not nearly as romantic as the people running Whitetail Properties want you to believe it is.