For World Menopause Day 2026, and SecondSpring’s first birthday
Menopause can only be diagnosed in hindsight. You reach it on the day you’ve gone twelve full months without a period. That means nobody can tell you you’re there while you’re getting there. Not your OB-GYN, not your mother, not your girlfriends, no matter how much you will it. You find out by looking back.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this month, because on October 18th, World Menopause Day, SECONDSPRING, the wellness brand we founded for women in perimenopause and beyond, turns one.
Menopause is twelve months after your last period. Insanity, I can now confirm, is twelve months after you launch a brand.
We picked World Menopause Day on purpose. It felt right to launch a menopause brand on the one day of the year the world agrees to talk about it. What I didn’t expect was for our first birthday to work like the diagnosis. The only way to know you’ve made it through a year is to count backwards. So I counted, and what I found was a year made almost entirely of seconds.
You’re allowed to have second thoughts
April was the worst sales month we’ve had. I did the math that corporate Jasmin used to do for other people’s brands: cost per acquisition, runway, how many boxes before we break even. I spent thirty years building brands for P&G and Coca-Cola, and here I was redoing the spreadsheet at midnight to see if the numbers would change. They didn’t.
Somewhere in there, I started having second thoughts. I stopped asking whether we were doing it right and started asking whether we should be doing it at all. I said this out loud to Carlos one night. He asked if I wanted to stop. I said no. He went back to checking the stock and creating the campaign.
Filipinos have two ways of staying. Tiis is enduring quietly because you think you have no choice. Kapit is holding on because you believe something is coming.
I’ve encouraged women to stop the “tiis lang” mentality through perimenopause. April was when I had to learn the difference myself. Was I staying because I believed in what we were building, or because I couldn’t bear the thought of walking away from it?
The answer, eventually, was that I still believed. But believing in something doesn’t mean you have to keep doing everything the way you’ve been doing it.
Make room for your second wind
It came when we started backing ourselves.
In June, we made a hard call. We let go of potential customers who were costing us more than they brought in, in time, energy and mental health. It felt like turning away business, which is the one thing a new founder is told never to do. We bit the bullet and trusted that the right customers would come and stay. They did, and we finally had the energy to go after the kind of growth we’d been too busy to chase.
That’s the most honest picture of menopause I know. A lot of women describe a point, somewhere after the worst of perimenopause, when the fog thins and some nights the sleep comes back. Some of that is time. But much of it, in my experience and in the stories women tell me, comes when we stop making room for what drains us. A second wind is easier to catch once you’ve put down some of what you were carrying.
Backing ourselves also meant fixing the mistake I’d do most differently. In our first months, we handed too much of the thinking to “experts”. We hired people who knew more than we did about e-commerce and I deferred to them even when the instinct I’d developed over 30 years of building brands was telling me something was off. It cost us money, and worse, it cost us time and energy we can’t ever get back.
Expertise is worth paying for. Handing over your judgment isn’t.
I see women do something similar with perimenopause. We walk into the doctor’s office and wait to be told what’s happening to us. A good doctor matters enormously, but nobody else lives in your body. Nobody else notices that you’ve started losing words mid-sentence or that your shoulder has ached for six months.
Bring notes. Ask the follow-up question. If the answer doesn’t match what you’re living, get a second opinion. You don’t have to choose between trusting your doctor and trusting yourself.
One day it will feel like second nature
This is my second act, and I don’t take for granted what cancer taught me about how I want to spend it. But I’ll admit the founder grind is not second nature yet. When I was working at Coca-Cola, every launch had a dedicated team, an agency to do the legwork and a timeline a project manager built. Here, it’s Carlos and me, and every task still takes a little more thought than it should.
Then came 10.10, and a sales day I would have called impossible in April. I checked the dashboard three times and then asked Carlos to check it, because a woman in menopause knows better than to trust her brain fog with a number that good. I’m not sharing this because one good day means we’ve made it. November could be another April. I’m sharing it because it showed me the things we fumbled through in April are starting to happen almost without thinking.
The same thing happens in your body after the change. The protein-rich breakfast in the morning, the strength training 3x a week, the 9pm bedtime your friends still tease you about all start out as effort. In the first year they feel like rules you’re following. If you keep at them, one day you notice you’re just living that way.
When you catch yourself second-guessing
If you’re in perimenopause right now, you won’t be able to tell whether this is the worst of it. Nobody can. That’s how the definition works. What you can do is count. Count the months you kept going, and the bad month you got through, and the good day you never saw coming. When you look back, it adds up to more than it felt like while you were living it.
To every woman who bought a box of SecondSpring, sent us a DM to ask a question or brought a friend to an event this year: you’re the reason the count reached twelve. And if someone carried you through your own second-guessing this year, send this to her. She probably doesn’t know.
Neither of these journeys has been tidy, and I’ve stopped waiting for them to be.
Mary Oliver wrote about wanting to look back at the end of her life and know she had lived in the world, and not just visited it.
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”
I think about that on the bad days more than the good ones. A year of seconds was never going to be neat but it was always going to be mine.