A Little MS with a Little MSW

Around the time I hit 40, I started noticing that everyone looked so young. It isn’t really something you can understand until you experience it, but it is hard to put faith in people – medical professionals, especially – when you can literally hear the squealing of their prefrontal cortex putting the final touches on its development, over the sounds of their freshly-shut textbook diagnosis of you.

Aside from wrinkles, a heapin’ helpin’ of heartache, and an autoimmune disease, the one thing age has given me is relief from the burden of intimidation.

Don’t get me wrong, I still experience intimidation from time to time, but not nearly on as grand a scale. Intimidation haunted me in my youth. And not in a beautiful way – in a haunted house kind of way. If I knew you to be older than me or perceived you to be smarter than me, or better than me (in whatever way glorified my insecurities at the time), intimidation bound and gagged me.

Very rarely will life throw you a bound and gagged menopausal woman, lol. I am many things at this point in my life, but quiet is not one of them.

I could have birthed most who just graduated medical school and I will likely encounter many of them as I continue my journey into old(er) age; however, I am no longer a prisoner to my insecurities. I have found my voice and I will use it. I will respect their shiny new MD as long as they can respect my lived experience, my voice that has been decades in the making…