The Tonic

I really fucking hate this perimenopause shite.

Every other month, for about a week, anxiety arrives in my body like an uninvited guest. Not anxiety about anything in particular. Just anxiety. A strange internal unsteadiness. A feeling that I am not quite sitting properly inside myself.

It is immensely discombobulating.

For the last two days, my nervous system has felt as though it has taken an absolute beating. The dogs were too loud. The television was too loud. The kids coming in and out of the house were too loud. The kettle was too loud. Someone moving around in another room was too loud. Even the supposedly calming game I was trying to play had become another source of noise.

Everything was getting in.

I woke with headaches. I wore sunglasses in the house because even the light felt intrusive. At one point I threw a weighted blanket over myself and just sat beneath it, concentrating on breathing slowly, trying to persuade my body that nothing terrible was happening.

Because nothing terrible was happening. That is perhaps the strangest part. My life was just happening around me, perfectly normally, while my body behaved as though it needed to escape it.

I've tried to get help. I've been to the doctor several times. I've been through the menopause clinic. I've been told I'm too young. I've been offered antidepressants, which doesn't feel like the answer to me. I'm not depressed. I don't spend my life feeling anxious. I seem to have a week, every month or every other month, when my hormones apparently decide to dismantle my nervous system for sport. And then, eventually, they bugger off again.

I didn't want to spend another evening sitting on the sofa feeling simultaneously disconnected from everything and overwhelmed by all of it. I just wanted to be somewhere else.

My friend Emily needed me to drop something at her house, and when she mentioned it I thought: absolutely. Let's get together.

Emily and I have known each other for more than twenty-five years. We met through work and have somehow accompanied each other through whole collections of lives since then. Different jobs. Different relationships. Different houses. Different versions of ourselves. She has known versions of me that my children will never know. I've known versions of her that don't exist anymore either.

And there is something incredibly comforting about being with somebody who doesn't require the backstory.

I arrived wanting nothing particularly profound. I wanted a cup of chamomile tea. I wanted a different room. I wanted somebody familiar.

Instead, we accidentally created exactly the evening we both needed.

We talked. Properly talked. Emily needed to unload about work. We talked about turning fifty and what that feels like. We talked about relationships, parents, choices, vulnerabilities, self-love, acceptance, the lives we thought we might have and the ones we actually built.

And because this is invariably what happens when the two of us get together, there was also a little witchery.

We lit candles. About eight or ten of them, until the room was almost entirely candlelight. We burned sage and Palo Santo and talked about what those smells meant to each of us. Palo Santo always transports me back to Lake Titicaca and the retreat I went to while visiting Emily in Peru — the first time either of us had encountered it. I ended up reading her the story I'd written about that trip, and we sat laughing about the retreat, Peru, and the people we had been then.

We ate cheese and crackers. We drank tea. We did cards.

Emily has owned a set of animal spirit cards for years, and somehow, despite the number of times we've pulled them out, I'd never actually had a reading from them. I pulled six. We made it through three. Three was enough.

The first was Black Panther. Passion. Follow your passion. The message was about expressing more of your true self, trusting what stirs something in you, and not spending your life trying to work out whether everybody else approves.

The second was Moose. Authority. You know what is best for you. That one landed harder. It talked about conditioned fears, shame, advice from others, and the point at which you have to stop outsourcing your life.

The third was Raccoon. Resourcefulness. You have all the resources you need. That felt almost comically appropriate, considering that not long before, I'd been sitting there with a pendulum, asking whether Wonderment could become something bigger — a book, a collection of stories, something more than a website. And there I was, asking whether I had what I needed, while holding a card that more or less said: look around. The stories are already here. The life is already here. The material is already here.

The remaining three cards — Butterfly, Cougar, Bear — read as Transformation, Confidence, Boundaries.

Taken together, the six felt less like a prediction and more like a mirror. Passion. Authority. Resourcefulness. Transformation. Confidence. Boundaries. They could almost have been chapter headings for the season of life I seem to be in — not because I believe a card can tell me what happens next, but because sometimes something lands at precisely the right moment and gives language to what has already been moving underneath you.

Maybe the cards weren't telling me who I was going to become. Maybe they were reflecting back the person I had spent the whole evening admitting I already was.

Because underneath the pendulum questions was another one, quieter than the rest: could I finally just *be* myself? Not become myself. Be myself.

Maybe nothing particularly dramatic is changing at all. Maybe I've simply reached the point where I no longer want to spend enormous amounts of energy translating myself into something more palatable. I like stories. I like herbs and candles and cards and strange little rituals. I like wondering about things. I like noticing people. I like sitting up until ridiculous hours discussing the meaning of our lives over cheese. Maybe there doesn't need to be an apology attached to any of it.

Emily's house made that thought feel even stranger, because I used to live there with her. The house has changed over the years — rooms evolve, furniture moves, lives happen — but it still feels familiar. Still strangely like home. There I was, sitting inside a place that had held a much younger version of me, talking about becoming more completely the person I am now.

We laughed a lot too. Proper stupid laughter. We remembered an Elbow concert. We remembered a night at Matt & Phred's in Manchester when everyone apparently decided we were a lesbian couple, and rather than correcting them, we just went along with it.

At one point Emily said how lovely it was simply to have another person in the house. Another body. Another energy. She lives alone and there was something incredibly tender about the way she said it — that just having somebody there made the house feel different.

Before I left, I gave her some of my tea leaves so she could make herself another brew. It was nearly three in the morning when I finally drove home. Poor Emily had work the next day.

I put music on in the car and parts of the evening kept replaying in my head. Busted came on. Then McFly. I drove through the darkness giggling to myself.

Only then did I realise something.

I wasn't anxious. I hadn't thought about being anxious for hours. Nothing had been too loud. Nothing had felt intrusive. My body hadn't been something I was desperately trying to manage.

I'd been pulled out of myself and into the room. Into candlelight. Into conversation. Into smell and taste and memory. Into another human being.

Nothing about my hormones had necessarily changed. Nobody had fixed me. We had simply created different conditions around my nervous system. Soft light. Warm tea. Familiar smells. Food. Laughter. Safety. History. A person who has known me for twenty-five years and therefore doesn't require an explanation for every version of me that walks into the room.

We shared some deep truths that night. Things came up and out of us, drifting into the space between us like smoke rising from dry sage leaves. Things we'd been carrying. Things we were frightened of. Things we hoped for. Things we were finally ready to say aloud.

Perhaps that's what friendship can sometimes be. Not advice. Not fixing. Not endlessly trying to make each other's lives better. Just witnessing. Two people sitting across from each other saying, in a hundred different ways: I see where you've been. I see where you are. I'm still here.

That evening was a tonic. A potion, really. Made from chamomile, candlelight, sage smoke, cheese and crackers, stupid stories, old memories, uncomfortable truths, and the particular kind of laughter that only exists between people who have known each other for half their lives.

Neither of us had planned it. Both of us needed it. And for a few hours, we gave each other somewhere soft to land.