The Burning Season

You are not crazy. You are not broken. You are not done. You are in a season - and the season has a name. For four to fifteen years before your last period, the hormone that ran the orchestra of your body for thirty-five years begins to fluctuate wildly and then to fall. Your sleep cracks open. Your moods arrive without forecast. Your joints ache. Your weight redistributes overnight. Your memory slips.
Your patience burns through. Doctors call it stress, anxiety, depression, burnout. They hand you an SSRI and send you home. None of it is in your head. The Burning Season is the book that comes before the menopause book - the field guide to the seven, ten, sometimes fifteen-year stretch nobody told us had a name. Across twelve chapters and three parts, this field guide walks through the diagnosis (the hormone map, the brain on fire, the body you no longer recognize), the reckoning (the rage, the marriage earthquake, the career pivot, the mother-daughter mirror), and the becoming (the doctor reckoning, the protocol, the wildness, the letter to your younger self).
Every chapter ends with a specific Protocol - a written audit, a rehearsed conversation, a two-week trial - designed to move the needle on one piece of the transition. You'll discover:- The biology of what is actually happening to estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone - and which symptoms most doctors will miss- A symptom inventory and hormone literacy quiz to take to your next appointment- What the evidence on hormone therapy actually says after the 2002 scare and the 2024 recalibration- A two-week sleep reset protocol built for a brain in hormonal chaos- The rage ledger - why this rage is data, not pathology- A partner conversation script for the marriage earthquake nobody warned you was coming- How to find a clinician who actually treats perimenopause, not one who dismisses itFor the women who were told it was anxiety, or stress, or aging - or that they were simply imagining the way their own body felt.
For readers of The Menopause Manifesto by Jen Gunter, Estrogen Matters by Avrum Bluming, and Fast Like a Girl by Mindy Pelz. You were burning. That is the word for it. And on the far side of the season is the most self-possessed half of your life. Turn the page. We have a lot of ground to cover. Let us begin with the burning.