The Unseen Hours: Waking Up to Myself
It’s 3:12 am, and again, I am awake.
No storm outside. No child crying. No alarm screaming.
Just me. A sudden, hot flush across my chest. A dampness slicking my lower back. The strange betrayal of my own body — a body I thought I had understood. A body I have lived in for forty-one years.
The shame spirals quickly — as if the sweat itself carries an accusation: You are broken.
As if the dampness, the slickness, the thick, uncomfortable heat pooling between my breasts and thighs was a moral failing.
I shift under the sheets. Damp.
I get up. I pad to the bathroom. I cry silently, head bent over the sink, the sweat not just from my skin now but from my soul.
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that blooms in the body when it feels foreign. An abandonment inside your own skin.
And when you love — truly love — someone who adores you back, that loneliness cuts doubly deep. Because the desire to stay close collides brutally with the urge to push them away.
I hate how I feel.
I hate how I look.
And I hate that this hate lives alongside a love that is enormous, enduring, and pure.
The Betrayal of Flesh: A Love Story Unravelling
I know it’s not rational. I know he still sees me — not the extra weight gathered stubbornly around my belly, not the shine of sweat at my temples, not the restless legs kicking out at midnight. He sees me.
But I can’t see me.
When I leave a chair and a wet outline darkens the fabric, shame floods me hotter than any flush.
When I catch myself tugging my top forward to cover the new curve of my belly, I bite the inside of my cheek.
When I say “not tonight,” one time too many, I see the shadow that flickers across his beloved face.
We are still best friends. He is still my home.
But when my own body feels like a haunted house, how can I invite him in?
I cry writing this because there is no guidebook for grieving the version of yourself you once knew.
No map for loving through the loneliness.
No soft hand at 3 am saying, “You’re still here. And you are still beautiful.”
The Hum of Hormones: Why It’s Not Just in Your Head
Premenopause.
A word that feels clinical, dry, detached.
It doesn’t begin to capture the way it rips into your life without invitation, without apology.
One moment you are solid — a woman whose body you could count on.
The next, you are a shifting, seething terrain of sleeplessness, sweat, irritability, grief, and body changes that mock every previous attempt at “control.”
It is hormonal, yes.
Oestrogen swinging wildly.
Progesterone fading into whispers.
Cortisol simmering under the skin like a kettle left boiling too long.
But it’s more than that.
It is spiritual.
It is existential.
It is the body whispering — no, screaming — for a new kind of attention. For a new kind of love.
A Love Letter to the Woman in the Mirror
And so, here is what I am trying, in the tender hours when shame and sweat try to unmake me:
I am letting the sweat mean something else.
Not shame.
Not decay.
But evidence. Evidence that I am alive. That my body is working so fiercely to keep me here.
I am touching the soft swell of my belly not with criticism but with awe: this is where I have stored survival, joy, protection.
I am learning to stay — with him, with myself — even when every reflex screams to run, to hide, to armour up.
I am rewriting beauty.
Beauty not as the absence of change, but as the willingness to be witnessed through it.
I am whispering to my body, even when my mind cannot believe it yet:
"Thank you. I love you. I am staying."
Reclaiming the Middle: Sensuality After Shame
This grief — this messy, sweaty, aching grief — is not the end.
It is the middle.
It is the portal.
If we can stay — through the nights of sweat and sorrow, through the mornings of body-hate and mirror-shame — we find something astonishing waiting for us:
Our wildness.
Our wisdom.
Our untamed, unapologetic selves.
Sensuality does not end because our bodies change.
It deepens.
It roots down into the molten core of us — the part that has always been more than smooth skin, more than flat bellies, more than the tightness of thighs.
The woman who rises from this middle place is a woman on fire with life.
A woman too sacred to be shamed.
A woman too wise to believe the narrow definitions of desirability handed down to her.
An Invitation: Rise Anyway
So to every woman sitting in the dark, wiping sweat from her chest, hating the mirror, pushing love away because her body feels foreign:
Stay.
Stay in the seat of your own heart.
Stay even when it aches.
Stay even when the world tells you to disappear.
Love your body, not because she has not changed, but because she has — and she is still worthy.
Still sacred.
Still yours.
Rise anyway.
In your sweat.
In your softness.
In your staggering, stunning becoming.
You are not alone.
You are not broken.
You are becoming more powerful than you ever imagined.