Growing up, menopause was described as simple: one day you had your period, the next you didn't. That was the entire story. No one mentioned that hormones shape every part of the body, mood, memory, bone, heart, sleep, sense of self.
For me, endo went unnamed for eighteen years — just something I lived with, managed quietly, worked around. Then came a cancer diagnosis, and treatment pushed me into chemical menopause almost overnight. Surgery followed — the same surgery that finally, after eighteen years, found the endometriosis. That was it. No slow transition. No easing in. Just acute, all-at-once menopause, with a body I was still learning and a diagnosis I'd waited two decades for, arriving on the same day.
I'm on local estrogen. Systemic HRT is still an open question for me — not a door closed, not a door open either, just something I live in the in-between of, like a lot of people navigating this after cancer.
You can choose a course of action and still mourn what it costs you.
I kept looking for somewhere that held the whole picture: research that took us seriously, stories that weren't performing, a shared language for what was happening in my body, and a community that didn't reduce any of it to a punchline. It wasn't there. So I started building it, on my own, in the hours around everything else.
The problem wasn't the practitioners; it was that I didn't know which kind to book, what to ask, or how to describe what I was feeling without sounding like I was making it up. You lose your sense of normal. You start to second-guess everything, including yourself.
What I actually had was screenshots. Hundreds of them. A notes app full of half-questions for my doctor, a calendar stacked with practitioner appointments, and one very patient friend who I asked the same things over and over because brain fog kept eating the answers. Nila is, in a real way, the place I wish I'd had open on my phone the whole time.
Everyone needs a Nila. Someone steady, well-read, and in your corner at 2 a.m. If you don't have someone like that yet, I hope this is a start.
And underneath all of it, the burnout most of us have been carrying since the pandemic, the kind that borrows perimenopause's clothes until you can't tell which is which.
Nila is that place. Evidence-based research. A quiet, kind community. Symptom tracking that stays private. A directory of practitioners with a guide to which one does what. And a promise: editorial independence, full disclosure, and a refusal to recommend anything we wouldn't pass on to someone we love.
If you're here, in the fog of perimenopause, the shock of chemical menopause, or the long reality of surgical menopause, you're not alone, you're not broken, and you're not behind. You're changing. The strength lives in there.
