What nobody told me about my ovaries
In 2021, I woke up every morning convinced the world was about to end.
That's not metaphor. That was my nervous system - scanning, bracing, detecting threat before my eyes were even open. I'd lie in bed counting backwards from ten thousand, my mind filled with worry that had no clear object. Sleep, already elusive, became nearly impossible. At work, I'd begin a task and lose the thread mid-sentence, not just distracted, but genuinely unable to reconstruct why I'd started it. And I gained 16.5 kilograms: just over 2.5 stone, or 27% of my original body weight. For someone who had maintained the same weight for four decades without any particular effort, that was alarming in its own right.
I attributed it to Covid. And to grief. My beloved father had died in 2020, and it had been traumatic. To burnout. To all the things we tell ourselves when our body is screaming and we don't yet have the language to listen.
My GP was dismissive. Politely so, but dismissively nonetheless. We were in the middle of a pandemic, I didn't press, and so I kept going.
Then I came across Davina McCall's documentary, and things started snapping into place. I recognised myself in what I was watching. I signed up to the waitlist for Dr Louise Newson's clinic, got my appointment three months later, and from the very first conversation the care was extraordinary. After an initial dose, we reviewed progress at three months. My symptoms reduced significantly. After a further review and adjustment, they largely disappeared.
And that's when the itch started.
The itch to do more
I began sharing my story with friends with the same passion I bring to anything I care about. And what I found broke my heart a little. So many women I loved had been suffering in silence. At least one had quit her job because of it. Several had been prescribed antidepressants. None of them had been given the information they needed to understand what was happening in their own bodies.
The itch didn't go away. In 2025, my brilliant friend and fellow coach Divinia Knowles mentioned a menopause doula course with the Menopause School. By November, I had signed up. Six months of intensive, self-paced training later, the thing that has changed me most isn't the clinical knowledge - though there is a great deal of that. It's the fundamental reframe.
Your ovaries are not just reproductive organs
We are taught - if we're taught anything at all - that the ovaries are reproductive organs. For me, as someone who has never wanted children, that framing made menopause feel irrelevant. A transition from the ability to have children to the ability not to. Low stakes.
What nobody told me is that the ovaries are a key organ, interacting with and influencing all eleven of the body's operating systems: from the brain and nervous system, to the cardiovascular system, to the digestive system, to our bones, our skin, our immune response. The sex hormones aren't just about reproduction. They are messengers. They hold the whole system in communication with itself.
Which means that when they begin to shift - as they do in perimenopause, often a decade before the final bleed - the effects are not confined to one system. They ripple through everything. And yet most of us are sent away with the message that what we're experiencing isn't real, isn't significant, or is simply part of getting older.
There is also something I find quietly radical in this reframe: understanding the menstrual cycle not as a countdown to your next bleed, but as a fifth vital sign, alongside temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure. A signal worth reading. A rhythm worth knowing. When you begin tracking it through that lens, you start to notice patterns in your energy, your emotional tone, your capacity for connection or solitude, your ability to focus or to create. And from that place, you have genuine agency. Not the performed kind of self-care. Actual agency, grounded in your own biology.
The dissolution that makes you
Most people know the caterpillar-to-butterfly story. What most people don't know is what actually happens inside the chrysalis: the caterpillar doesn't gradually grow wings. It dissolves. It becomes, for a period, entirely undifferentiated cellular soup - no longer what it was, not yet what it will be. Then it reorganises into something structurally different.
Where I want to play
I have spent years coaching women leaders. I care about embodiment and the relationship between the body and how we lead, think, and show up. I care about thresholds. The moments where everything reorganises.
Perimenopause is one of the most significant thresholds a woman will cross. And most of us are crossing it alone, undertreated and underprepared.
That is what I want to change. The intersection of women's leadership, embodiment, and the perimenopause passage is exactly where I want to work. It's where everything I care about meets.
I can't wait to see what comes next.
With deep love, writing to you from inside my chrysalis,
Dag
