The post is titled I miss who I used to be. It has 1,076 upvotes in the largest perimenopause community, and the writer is not describing a symptom. She is describing a person.
At 35 I was on top of everything - I was in a respected leadership position, our kids were thriving, and I knew who I was as a Mom, our marriage had more warmth and excitement.
At 46, I feel completely distant from that woman, and it's been causing the most intense grief. I love who I used to be! And I really dislike the numb, passionless person I have become - a stranger in my own life.
Then the line that explains why she wrote it at all:
I need a place to say the things I can't say out loud in polite society.
The top comment, at 12 upvotes, is not advice. It is "I would seriously love to sit in a circle with you ladies and just commiserate for a while." Nobody in the thread tells her she is wrong.
One thing before the rest. If the distance from yourself has become low mood that does not lift, hopelessness, or any thought of not wanting to be here, that is not grief for a younger self and it is not for an article. Contact a clinician or a crisis line today. The rest of this page is for the far more common version.
Why do I feel like a stranger in my own life?
Feeling like a stranger in your own life is what women describe when several capacities go at once. The woman you miss was never one thing. She was a set running together: sleep that held, a drive that showed up before the task, a temper with a long fuse, words that arrived when called, a body that behaved predictably, and a tolerance for other people that cost nothing. What the posts describe is that set going offline unevenly, over years, with no name attached. So the loss gets filed where unexplained losses go: as a verdict on you.
Each piece has its own page here, because each has its own levers: the sleep, the missing drive, which is the half of this most worth reading next, the words, the fuse and the tolerance. This page is about the sum. All of them going at once is not five symptoms. It is the feeling of having been replaced.
There is a second reason it feels like a stranger rather than a symptom, and it is about time. Before anyone names it, she is most often sent toward therapy, then depression, then her thyroid. A loss that goes unnamed for years does not stay a loss. It becomes a story about character: lazier, flatter, colder, less. The woman in the post has been measuring herself against 35 for eleven years, and nobody in that time said the word.
Is this grief?
Missing who you used to be is grief, and the community got there before any of us. Grief is the word the 1,076-upvote post uses, "the most intense grief", and it is the word in the title of one of the highest-scoring posts in the history of the community, at about sixteen hundred upvotes:
I'm grieving my younger, hotter self
I'm so mad about being in peri. I'm not ready.
But today I just miss looking good in a sundress. Please join my pity party and tell me what you miss.
That is the shape of this grief, and it is not what it looks like from outside. She is not mourning a body. She is mourning a woman who had something and did not know it, and the grief is partly for the having and partly for the not knowing. "Tell me what you miss" is the naming, and you cannot grieve a thing you have not named.
The objects are specific when women write them down. The one on top of everything. The one in the sundress. And from a 459-upvote post about brain fog at work: "I realize now that the old 'smart' me is gone and I grieve for her."
Will I feel like myself again?
Whether you feel like yourself again has an honest answer in the corpus, and it has two halves.
The first half is that women do describe coming back, and they describe it in exactly these words. The post I feel like myself again. Which sounds so simple to say, but it's huge. has 1,014 upvotes. Another, at 210: "I feel like myself again. I feel like my spark is back." What they describe returning is the set: sleep, drive, the fuse, the words. The person comes back when the capacities do.
The second half is the one almost nobody prints. The most careful post on the subject, at 41 upvotes, is from a woman of 40 a year into hormone therapy. She wrote that she felt a hundred per cent better than a year earlier, and then corrected herself: this was a new hundred per cent, and she put it at about sixty per cent of how she had felt at 35. A new 100. That is the line to hold on to, because it does not lie to you in either direction. Something comes back. It is not the 35-year-old, and the women who have been through it say so.
Those are treatment stories, and treatment is a conversation for a clinician who knows your history; More Herself does not advise on it. What is yours regardless is the other half of the return: the self that comes back is not the old one plus a decade. The tolerance for things that were always unreasonable tends not to return, and women mostly write that they do not want it back. The 1,685-upvote post that opens "I don't feel depressed, I just want to do... nothing" contains this:
I don't know who I am. And I don't even mind.
When it is more than perimenopause
Missing who you used to be is more than perimenopause when it stops having an object and stops lifting. Take this part seriously rather than politely, because grief and depression can wear the same clothes and they have different answers.
- Low mood that does not lift. Weeks of it, with no stretches of ordinary life in between.
- Worthlessness, hopelessness, or the sense that the people around you would be better off without you.
- Any thought of not wanting to be here. Contact a crisis line or a clinician today. Not after the list below. Today.
- Grief with a real and recent object. A parent, a marriage, a diagnosis. A 594-upvote post from a woman whose husband of twenty-eight years had just left reads: "I have no idea who I am anymore. I got married at 24. My identity has been wrapped up in wife and mother." That is a different loss, and grief counselling exists for exactly it.
The distinction worth taking to a clinician, rather than settling alone, is what the loss is about. Grief for a self, as women describe it, is about a specific woman in a specific year; it comes in waves, it lifts for stretches, and you can still enjoy things once you are in them. The flat version that does not lift and is not about anything belongs with a clinician, and having one does not rule out the other. The therapy-then-depression path above is so often the wrong door that it is easy to forget it is sometimes the right one.
What do I do about missing who I used to be?
What to do about missing who you used to be is a method, the same way grief has a method, and none of it requires feeling like yourself first. That is the point.
Name the year, not the woman
"Who I used to be" is too big to grieve or to recover. "Me at 35" is a year, and a year has contents. Write down, in one sitting, what that year actually had in it: Tuesday evenings, what you were reading, who you saw, what you were training for, what you were putting up with. Some of the list is capacity, and capacity has levers. Some of it is circumstance: smaller children, a different job, a marriage at a different stage, a body that had not yet had to be managed. Circumstance is not coming back, and it was never you. Separating the two is a large part of the grief work, and it takes an evening.
Do one thing she used to do, badly, this week
This is the whole practice and the reason the page exists. Pick one thing from the list that the woman you miss did, the thing that was most hers: the run, the piano, the dinner party, the book a week, the thing she made. Do it this week, at a fraction of the old standard, with no attempt to do it well.
Badly is the instruction, not a concession. The identity was never in the standard. It was in the doing, and the standard is the part currently being used as evidence against you: she ran ten kilometres, you can barely manage two, therefore she is gone. Two kilometres, slowly, on Thursday, is the counter-evidence. A self is a set of things done, not a score, and the fastest way to feel less like a stranger is to catch yourself doing one thing she did.
Say it out loud to one person
The post exists because its writer had nowhere to say it "in polite society". The top comment wanted a circle. Find one person and say the sentence. Not the symptoms; the sentence. "I miss who I used to be and I don't know how to say that to anyone." A partner can hear it if the conversation is set up properly, and that conversation has its own page. A friend of the same age very often says it back.
What is this life
That is the title of a 1,324-upvote post, a diary entry covering one ordinary evening of maintenance, and the top comment on it, at 21 upvotes, is the whole subject of this page:
What. The fuck. Has happened. I feel this question on a cellular level.
The woman in the first post signed off with "none of us are alone." She is right in a way she may not have meant. What thousands of women are describing from the inside is not the end of a self. It is a self with several parts switched off and nobody yet holding the switches. Take one.