Oh the rage, the astonishing rage. It’s as confusing to me as to you

Changes: Nikki Gemmell at home. Picture: Jane Dempster

I wish to apologise. To all the people I’ve snapped at over the recent past, who were on the receiving end of irritation and an unseemly, discombobulating temper. To the many people I’ve come across – some close, some on the road, or in shops perhaps – who I may have wished to kill at times. Oh the rage, the astonishing rage. As confusing to me as to you.

I wish to apologise because something came over me in those moments and I took it out on others in an explosion of righteous fury, even though someone inside me was going whoa, what’s that all about?Hello, where have you gone to? Please resume normal service. Except I couldn’t. Because my body has been going through a vast hormonal reckoning as seismic as the onset of a girl’s period, but the changes this time around actually feel worse. The process has been so protracted and messy, and with a battering to my mental equilibrium the like of which I’ve never before experienced. It’s been lasting for years, five, maybe seven, not too sure, but it feels like my buoyancy has been hijacked for quite some time now and it’s been bewildering and depressing.

Where have I gone to? It’s an almost crippling vulnerability coupled with a profound lack of confidence. And I say this as I struggle to write this column, to even write, but writing is my ballast, I couldn’t not. Yet this is new. This… faltering. In so many aspects of my life.

It is of course the menopause. The Great Hidden in a woman’s story; the one female milestone my mother and I never really talked about. No one did, publicly, for generations it seems, until very recently. Partners, families and colleagues around the menopausal woman need to understand more fully the profound changes a woman is undergoing, and perhaps forgive. I’d describe menopause as a great rupturing, physically and mentally. It varies in intensity for every woman – some are barely affected. I’ve never felt more vulnerable. Last week I walked through the CBD with blood on the back of my dress. Had no idea until I got home. Was mortified, perplexed, shocked. Thought I’d stopped all that months ago but this came upon me so suddenly and voluminously. No warning.

But this is nothing compared to the impact on my mental state. My confidence has been sapped. I’m snappy, easily upset, low. There are sudden flushes of heat sprinting across my skin. A loss of libido, just not interested, coupled with what feels like a lifetime’s accumulation of exhaustion and a bodily thickening that’s distressing – this was never me. I ache for the time when I’m beyond it all, out the other side. When, when?

But I keep going, as women always have. Astonished at times at what I’ve become but knowing I’m not alone as more and more of us speak up. Like Alison Brahe-Daddo, the former model confronted by all the bewilderments of menopause and tackling them in an incisive and courageous new book called Queen Menopause. She says the hormonal process she’s been going through “turns my feelings up to 11”.

Brahe-Daddo talks about menopause’s disruptive impact on relationships: “One of the things I wanted to focus on was how menopause affects your partner because if you look at the rates of divorce, it’s often in that 50-year-old age group. It may be that women are going, ‘I’ve finally woken up,’ but it could also be that it’s an incredibly challenging time for some couples to deal with.” She says it’s important that mothers communicate to kids how they’re feeling; that they reassure them physical changes and moods are because of hormones – and have nothing to do with them.

If I could have done things differently over the past few years I would have. I gaze from the sidelines of my life in astonishment. Where have I gone to? Will I come back?