There is a particular kind of forgetting that happens in perimenopause that no one really warns you about. Not the dramatic, frightening forgetting people associate with dementia—something quieter than that, and stranger.
You walk into a room and the reason dissolves before you reach the doorway. A word you have used a thousand times hovers just out of reach. A conversation from last Tuesday feels as though it happened in another life, or possibly to someone else entirely.
For many women, this is one of the most disorienting parts of hormonal transition—not the hot flushes, which at least have a name and a narrative, but the soft, flickering quality that descends on memory and thought. The sense that your own mind has become unreliable. That you are somehow less yourself.
I have yet to experience hot flushes, but I have noticed issues with my memory for a while. I needed to know what was actually happening. Of course, biology is involved. Understanding it does not make it less strange, but it can make it feel less like a personal failing. For me, it quietened the paranoia of imagining the worst-case scenario.
Memory changes should be discussed with a qualified healthcare professional and should not be self-diagnosed, whether you suspect perimenopause or not.
What hormones do to the brain
Oestrogen is not only a reproductive hormone. It is involved in brain function, influencing mood, cognition, verbal memory and the speed at which neurons communicate. During perimenopause, as oestrogen levels fluctuate and eventually decline, the brain is responding to a significant shift in its chemical environment. It is managing and adjusting to change.
Women often report difficulty with word retrieval, short-term memory lapses and a mental fogginess that can feel alarming when you do not know what may be causing it. Progesterone also has a calming effect on the nervous system. As levels change, anxiety, reactivity and disrupted sleep can compound the cognitive effects. Sleep deprivation alone can impair memory consolidation; layered with hormonal disruption, its effect on clarity can be significant.
This is not a niche experience, yet it remains one of the least-discussed aspects of the transition. I did not realise until recently that my memory issues could be connected. As a woman in her forties, feeling many changes both mentally and physically, the possible symptoms of perimenopause can feel never-ending. The memory element only became obvious through having more conversations about it.
The emotional weight of a shifting mind
What science does not always capture is what it feels like to live inside this experience. The cognitive symptoms rarely arrive in isolation. They come alongside shifting identity, changing relationships, children growing up, careers evolving, ageing parents and a body that feels newly unfamiliar.
Memory is not just a function. It is how we hold our sense of self—how we know who we are, where we have been and what we have built. When memory becomes unreliable, it touches something deeper than inconvenience.
Women describe a grief that is hard to name: not mourning a person, but mourning a version of themselves. The sharp, quick self who never lost her thread in a meeting. The one who remembered every birthday without prompting. The one who felt, in some fundamental way, in command of her own mind.
I am constantly finding ways to adjust and cope. Quietly acknowledging what is happening to yourself can help. Once you accept the situation, you can begin making changes that support you.
This is the emotional terrain that much of the menopause conversation still does not reach. We have made progress in talking about the physical: HRT is more accessible, hot flushes are acknowledged and workplace conversations have begun. But the inner life of this transition—the way it reshapes a woman’s relationship with time, memory and herself—is still largely unwitnessed. We are often demonised for going through something over which we have little control, yet offered very little support. The lack of empathy is shocking.
Why art matters here
There is something art can do that information cannot: it can make a person feel seen. When we encounter an image, a piece of music or a poem that holds an experience we thought was ours alone, something shifts. The isolation lifts. The experience becomes, if not easier, at least less lonely.
This is why art made from and for women’s inner lives carries a particular kind of weight, especially when it reflects experiences the wider culture has historically overlooked or dismissed. The more art we create to represent womanhood and its difficulties, the more awareness and conversation become possible.
Memory Flutters, my original watercolour on linen, was made from exactly this place. Painted during my own perimenopause, it does not try to resolve or prettify the experience. Instead it holds it—the softness, the dissolution at the edges, the feeling of reaching for something that moves as you approach it.
The watercolour medium enacts the theme: colour bleeds and merges; form refuses to be fixed. It is art made from the inside of an experience rather than the outside of it. That distinction matters.
“I see this. I painted this. This is real—and it is also beautiful.”
Living alongside the transition
The women who navigate perimenopause most steadily are not necessarily those who resist it most fiercely, but those who find ways to stay in relationship with themselves through it. That might look like therapy, community, movement or creativity. It almost always involves some form of witness: the sense that what is happening is real, significant and deserves care rather than dismissal.
Choosing what surrounds you matters more than we often admit. The objects in our homes, the images on our walls, the things we reach for when we need to feel held—and the people we choose to bring into our orbit—are not trivial choices. They are part of how we create an environment that supports rather than undermines our inner life.
An art print is a small thing. But something on your wall that says, “I see this, I painted this, this is real and it is also beautiful”—that is not nothing. For many women, it is quietly everything.
