The Perimenopausal Ability to Smell The Past

Is this a thing? Tell me you know what I'm talking about!

(audio read by me)

If you picture something folded, a towel, a slice of pizza, you get the idea, the two ends that touch remind me of my 50’s and my teens. These periods in my life feel similar in that I really feel, like, THIS IS ME. And unfortunately, I can’t articulate it any better than that. I have a small knowing that this will be the predominant feeling of this decade. This is the still immature older-age-decade. There’s such a sweetness to this decade. I find myself feeling really content despite (gestures wildly towards the world) everything. My middle years, say, age 23-50 are also very much me, but those years are a fraternal twin. We just don’t look anything alike but we share the same DNA.

These free-writes that I’m doing almost daily remind me of writing in my teens, minus the computer. I’d have HATED how much I love computers now. One of my first standup bits (it wasn’t funny but hey, I was trying to say something important! LOL) was about how I hate Bill Gates for wanting us all to stay inside on computers. I mean, seeing as he was all up in Epstein’s Island, was I wrong about this guy being the worst? To put it stupidly mildly?

Anyway, I’m thinking about the poetry zine I co-authored in high school, with my two gay-male friends, David and Forrest. I mention that they’re gay to really set the scene, that there was that pure comfortability that a girl feels around boys who want nothing from her other than true friendship. I wrote under the pseudonym Lola Miss. I don’t know why I didn’t use my real name, seeing as I was handing them out to anyone with arms in my high school hallways. I know that I always loved the name Lola because of Barry Manilow’s song Copacabana. The principal didn’t like our little zine and told us we had to stop making it. She said that it was morose and depressing, and we were like, “Yeah, exactly. We’re teenagers writing poetry. Umm….is there any other way to be?”

I found a copy of that zine (God, I wish I remembered the name!) in 2019. It kind of broke my heart to read it because I could see now from the principal’s POV, it sounded like the three of us were on the edge. But we really weren’t. We were full of such JOY. We were happy to be feeling SO MUCH. We loved life. We were very much aware that this was a sweet spot, no responsibilities, endless time to be creative, and we didn’t have to buy our own staplers. Anyway, the same month that I found that zine, I heard from Forrest, now Chris, who was passing through Chicago right when I had a show there. I hadn’t spoken to him since high school. The timing was magical. He came to my show, and backstage I gave him the zine. I wanted him to be the keeper of this only living copy (I think). I had taken photos of my poems and that was enough for me. (Of course, I deleted them by mistake, because ADHD, and yes it’s been on my to-do list for 7 years now, to reach out to Chris and see if he can snap some pics of what Lola Miss was saying.)

Anyway, there’s something about perimenopause that brings me back to that teenaged girl who loved to sit in her room, or anywhere really, and write poetry, without caring if it’s good or correct. I mean this literally and figuratively, whether it’s poetry or just me being me, dressing how I want, etc.

Okay, any other perimeno peeps experiencing the return of certain SMELLS? I swear I can smell things that I haven’t smelled since I was a teenager. It’s like when a perfume gets reissued and you catch a whiff and BOOM, the molecules in your body change and you’re RIGHT BACK THERE - wherever that is. It smells like summer in the late 1980’s to me, and I’m hundreds of miles from where I grew up but sometimes the wind will just waft by and I’m struck. Is there some quantum superposition thing going on here? Am I just inches from an invisible wall leading to another dimension where I’m 15? Is it memory? Or is it more?

It’s too bad that perimenopause is only NOW being talked about and studied. If it had been at all acknowledged ever, I imagine we’d now be at the part where people are studying why our sense of smell has the ability to conjure up memories on its own.

Well, that’s about all my brain has today on that topic. Happy smells to all of you middle-aged women. xo, jen

Photo “Lola Miss” in the high school cafeteria 1989