Is it Perimenopause or Just the Reality of Being Conscious These Days?”

The other day I Googled “cute sneakers for plantar fasciitis” and realized that if ages had phrases, that one would belong to 48. That’s how old I am – old enough to need support sneakers and young enough to still care that they’re stylish. Over the summer – back when I was only 47 and still technically mid-40s, not quite stepping on the toes of 50 yet – I developed plantar fasciitis for the first time and spent the next two months rolling the sole of my foot on a hard pink rubber ball that I kept in the freezer wedged between a bottle of vodka and a bag of frozen gyoza. 

I posted about my predicament in an Instagram story and right away, lots of people shared tips and advice for dealing with plantar fasciitis, including the recommendation to wear indoor shoes, which everyone said was an absolute must. Until then, I’d only ever been barefoot or worn slippers at home, never shoes, but then I turned 47 and got plantar fasciitis and spent an entire summer hobbling around in pain in a gel-bottomed foot wrap and I’ll wear shoes indoors for the rest of my life now if it’ll prevent that from ever happening again.

I probably got the plantar fasciitis from rage walking last summer in shitty sandals that I bought for a few dollars at a sports supply store in Southwest Missouri. That’s where my parents live, and back in June right after school got out, Drew and I took the kids to visit them. While we were there, Trump and Biden had that disastrous debate, which I didn’t even watch live because I just couldn’t stomach it, but I heard all about it online later and I was so full rage that I pounded my feet all up and down the wooded walking paths of my parents’ subdivision a couple of hours every day for the rest of our visit. A few days after we got back to Brooklyn, I developed a cramp in my foot that was so bad I couldn’t walk and now I’m a person who wears shoes indoors.

It took months to heal but by November, I was mostly there, right in time to increase my rage-walking again, which I was doing a lot of after the election. I was also reading up on astrology and following witchy mystic subgroups on social media – mostly Threads – trying to find any crumb of hope that something – anything – might happen to save us from Trump actually taking office again in January. In many of the threads I was seeing, there was a collective discussion about how so many of us had jolted awake at 3 am on the morning of November 6th, all with the same gut feeling that something was really “off.” Well, yeah, no shit – the election went to Trump, that’s what was off.

But waking up at 3 am isn’t anything different for me. Since starting perimenopause in my mid-40s, I’d been waking up at 3 am almost every night, sometimes lying in bed – or, ok, scrolling my phone in the dark – for an hour or more until falling back asleep (if I was lucky). Almost every night! No wonder I was feeling a lot of rage. Just a few weeks before the election, I started hormone replacement therapy to treat the insomnia and other peri symptoms (Did you know plantar fasciitis is a symptom?! Yep, along with about 199 other random things, like “frozen shoulder” too.). The HRT seemed to be helping; I found myself waking up only two or three times a week instead of nightly, but then the election happened and Trump won and how can anyone with a functioning brain sleep soundly after that?

When my HRT provider checked in with me in December to see how I thought the dose was working for me, I told her I didn’t know whether it was a hormone adjustment I needed or a better reason to believe that the guardrails of our democracy are strong enough to protect us from all the predictions I was reading about in the astrology threads at 3 am every night. And now here we are at the end of January and I’m still waking up in the middle of the night four or five times a week, still scrolling my phone like I know I shouldn’t, still unsure whether I need to adjust my HRT or whether my reaction to *all this* is normal and maybe putting my phone in a different room at night is all the treatment I need.

For what it’s worth, the astrologers and mystics are predicting something huge – potentially earth-shattering – in March. So far, no one has been able to indicate whether it’ll make me want to do more rage walking or less but I’ll have some cute supportive sneakers, my frozen pink rubber ball, and a bottle of vodka ready, regardless.

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