Menopause, Brain Fog, & Your Creative Energy

There's a version of me from a few years ago who would have sat down to write this and immediately started hitting delete over everything real and raw. Softening it and making it smaller and more polite before anyone even read it.

I'm not doing that today.

Here's the truth: somewhere in the last few years, my brain changed. Not in a dramatic, one-morning way, but more like a slow tide going out. Words I'd used my whole life started hiding from me mid-sentence. I'd walk into my studio with a clear idea and lose it before I picked up a brush. Some days the fog was so thick I couldn't tell if I was tired, sad, or just... gone. And nobody had warned me that creativity, the very thing I'd built my whole second act around, would be one of the first things to feel the shift.

Nobody talks about this part. You'll find a thousand articles about hot flashes and sleep and hormones, and maybe one aside, buried in paragraph nine, about "mood changes." But almost no one says it plainly: menopause can knock on the door of your creative energy and just let itself in. It can take the part of you that used to reach for color and texture without thinking, and make that reaching feel like wading through wet sand. I want to say the thing I needed someone to say to me: You are not invisible. You are not lost. You are not alone. Even on the days your hands still know what they used to do, and your brain won't get out of the way long enough to let them - you are returning.

What I've learned, slowly, and mostly by accident, is that creativity during this season doesn't look like it used to, and it isn't supposed to. It looks like fifteen minutes instead of three hours. It looks like gluing down a torn piece of paper because that's all the follow-through you have in you today, or because you hate what you just painted and want to cover it up. And letting that be enough is simply enough. It looks like giving yourself permission to make something unfinished, lopsided, half-formed; because perfection can take a long nap while you figure out what your hands can actually do right now.

I've stopped expecting my brain to show up the way it did at thirty. Instead, I've started meeting it where it is. Some days that means working in silence because words on a podcast are too much input.  Others I am bouncing around the room working on 3 projects and loving them all, voice texting myself reminders I will absolutely not remember to read. And most days I am wandering in circles, trying to remember, stay focused and keep all my ducks in a row while being exhausted, hot and honestly a bit blah. Small scaffolding, built for the brain I actually have, not the one I'm mourning.

If you're in this fog too, I want you to hear this clearly: it is not a sign that the creative in you left. She's not gone, just waiting for you to stop needing her to show up the old way before you'll let her show up at all. Begin exactly where you are. Fifteen minutes. One torn edge of paper. One color that feels right today, for no reason you can explain.

That's not a lesser kind of creativity. That might actually be the truer one.

xo,  Amy