Every fashion editor will tell you September is the real New Year. January gets the half-hearted gym resolutions. September gets the thickest magazine of the year — the one Anna Wintour built an entire documentary around, heavy enough to double as a doorstop or a bicep curl. It’s the month the industry decides who everyone is going to be for the next twelve months, one statement bag at a time.
I used to buy into it completely. I’d flip through those September issues during my corporate years like they were scripture, dog-earing co-ords I told myself I’d wear to meetings I no longer attend.
This year, I’ve got a different kind of September issue. The issue: hardly anyone knows that September is also Perimenopause Awareness Month.
The 48 signs of perimenopause*: how many can you name?
Let’s start with the number that left me gobsmacked when I found out: there are 48 signs of perimenopause. Forty-eight. And most women, myself included at the start of this, can name maybe five.
Hot flashes. Mood swings. Irregular periods. Brain fog, which I used to just call forgetfulness. Belly weight gain. That’s the whole list most of us are handed.
Meanwhile the other forty-three are quietly showing up uninvited — joint pain (frozen shoulder, anyone?), tinnitus, itchy skin, heart palpitations, burning tongue (a real one, I promise), rage that arrives with no warning — and nobody tells you they’re related, so you go around thinking you’re either falling apart or losing your mind, when really, you’re just perimenopausal and under-informed. You can’t manage what you can’t name. That’s not a hormone problem. That’s an education problem, and it’s the whole reason SecondSpring exists in the first place.
There’s something else worth knowing about those 48 signs: they don’t arrive all at once, and they don’t leave quickly.
Perimenopause is not a single bad week. It’s roughly a decade. Ten years, give or take, from the first symptom to the other side of it. Which means somewhere in my forties, without a formal project kick-off, I had started my own Odyssey.
I don’t say that lightly. Odysseus didn’t take ten years to get home because he was lost. He took ten years because there were sirens, and a cyclops, and a witch who turned his crew into pigs, and every single detour tested whether he still remembered who he was underneath all of it. He eventually got home. Changed, scarred, wiser, occasionally furious — but home. That’s perimenopause. It’s not a punishment for aging. It’s a genuinely long journey with real monsters in it (mine currently include waking up at 3am and a left knee that stiffens every time I sit for more than an hour), and the point was never to arrive unscathed. The point is to arrive.
Perimenopause in September: From Issue to Opportunity
Old habits die hard — my corporate training still wants to turn every issue into an opportunity. But when it comes to perimenopause in September, that reframing is actually necessary.
There’s so much dramatization around the symptoms that it’s easy to only see the negative. Whenever I talk to a woman in her 40s, I tell her the truth: being on the other side of it in your 50s is genuinely liberating. But I also respect her when she pushes back: “That’s easy for you to say. I’m still in it. The fog hasn’t lifted yet.”
She’s right. And that’s exactly why SecondSpring isn’t just about opening minds — handing over a list of 48 symptoms and calling it mission accomplished, awareness raised. Information alone doesn’t get you home from the Odyssey.
What actually helps is changing mindsets and deciding this decade isn’t a decline to manage quietly until it’s over, but a season, the way spring is a season, with its own weather and its own harvest. SecondSpring isn’t a rebrand of getting older. It’s a refusal to treat this decade as decline, when it’s actually the start of something better.
So this September, I’m not choosing between the new season’s fashion inspiration and the opportunity to do perimenopause education. I’m not choosing between the woman who used to dog-ear Vogue and the one budgeting her energy like currency. Both issues are running this month. Both are mine.
And in case I needed one more piece of proof that September matters — it’s also my wedding anniversary. Sixteen years of being married to Carlos, of building a life with a man who puts up with me forgetting to press the elevator button every time we’re together, and somehow, without reading the fine print, also signed up for PerimenopauSeptember.
Which of the 48 symptoms surprised you the most? (Or better yet, how many could you name before reading this?) Tell me below, and if you want the full list of 48, I’ve broken them down over at The 48 Signs of Perimenopause.