The Moon × Perimenopause: Trusting a Body in Transition
The Moon x Perimenopause
There's a particular brand of disorientation that comes with perimenopause—not quite illness, not quite wellness, but something stranger: your body speaking a language you thought you knew, now full of unfamiliar syntax. You wake at 3 a.m. drenched and disoriented. Words you've used your whole life hide just behind your teeth. Your temperature regulation becomes unreliable in ways that feel both trivial and violating.
The medical establishment will offer you terminology: vasomotor symptoms, cognitive fog, mood lability, as if naming the thing might tame it. The wellness industry will sell you solutions, as if this transition were simply a problem to be optimized away with the right supplements and morning routine.
But what if perimenopause isn't a malfunction at all? What if it's a threshold: the body dismantling one version of itself to make room for another, and you just happen to be conscious during the demolition?
Why The Moon Card Appears During Perimenopause
In tarot, The Moon shows up when the path forward is unclear, when you can't trust what you're seeing, when the ground you thought was solid turns out to be shifting. There are two towers in the distance, a domesticated dog and a wild wolf, a crayfish emerging from murky water. Everything is illuminated by moonlight, but nothing is quite what it seems.
The card makes people nervous because it refuses to resolve. It doesn't tell you what's real and what's illusion; it suggests that maybe that's not the right question. Maybe the twilight space between knowing and not-knowing has its own intelligence.
This is precisely the territory of perimenopause: your body in its own twilight, no longer quite what it was, not yet what it's becoming. The symptoms we pathologize—the night sweats, the brain fog, the emotional weather that arrives without forecast—these aren't malfunctions. They're the body's way of dismantling one version of itself to make room for another. You just happen to be awake for it, and nobody warned you it would feel this disorienting.
What's Actually Happening: The Body's Translation Project
So you probably already know this, but perimenopause can feel like shit. I would like this to stop now shit.
The hot flashes aren't some gentle fire ceremony. They're your thermostat malfunctioning at the client meeting, during sex, in the middle of the grocery store. The brain fog isn't misty dreamy; it's forgetting the word for "strainer" while standing at your sink. The emotional swings aren't your inner wild woman emerging; they're crying at a car commercial and then wanting to scream at someone for chewing too loudly.
And yet. Perimenopause asks the same question The Moon asks: what if you can't optimize your way through this?
Because here's what's actually happening: your body is eating itself and rebuilding itself and you don't get a vote. For decades you moved through roughly predictable cycles: ovulation, preparation, release, reset. Your energy ebbed and flowed in patterns you could eventually work with, or around, or at least brace for. You learned when to schedule the important meeting (not day one of your period). When you'd have energy for difficult conversations. When to just cancel everything and be horizontal.
Now those patterns are dissolving. The hormonal conversation your body's been having with itself since puberty is changing register, and for a while (two years, ten years, who knows), there's just static.
The hot flashes? Your internal thermostat being reprogrammed. The insomnia? Your circadian rhythms looking for a new baseline while you lie there at 3 a.m. wondering if you'll ever sleep again. The brain fog? Your neural pathways reorganizing around different hormonal landscapes. The emotional volatility? Every feeling you've been carefully managing for decades suddenly right there, unmediated, before you've decided whether you want to deal with it.
This is not comfortable. But comfortable and wrong aren't the same thing.
What your body needs you to know
Place both hands on your belly or your chest. Take three breaths. Ask your body (not your mind): What are you trying to tell me?
You might get: I'm tired. I'm hot. I'm angry. I don't know what I want anymore. I'm scared this won't end. I miss feeling like myself.
You don't have to fix any of it. You're just gathering information about where you actually are, not where you think you should be.
The Moon's Lesson: Uncertainty as Intelligence
The Moon card appears during liminal times—those in-between spaces where you're no longer who you were but not yet who you're becoming. It suggests that some wisdom can only be accessed when you stop trying to force clarity. Some truths only reveal themselves when you quit demanding they make sense right now.
In perimenopause, your body is entering its own liminality. The reproductive phase is ending (or has ended, or is ending so slowly you can't mark the moment). The post-reproductive phase hasn't quite begun. You're in the space between moons, when the sky goes dark not because the moon has disappeared but because it's turning its face away.
This is when people start Googling "am I losing my mind" and "is this normal." This is when the medical model offers solutions—HRT, SSRIs, other interventions designed to ease the transition. And sometimes those interventions are exactly right. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is give your body the support it needs to navigate this passage without being in constant crisis. Medical support isn't avoiding the transition; it's creating the conditions where you can actually hear what your body is trying to tell you instead of just surviving the noise.
But even with support, even with hormones or whatever else helps, the question remains: What do you want this next phase to be?
The Rewilding Nobody Mentions
The hot flash that arrives during the important meeting. The tears that show up without warning. The absolute inability to pretend you're fine when you're not. These are the wild parts of you refusing to stay quiet anymore.
The Moon card shows both a domesticated dog and a wild wolf, howling at the same light. This is the duality of perimenopause too: you contain both the version of yourself that has learned to function in the world as it is, and the version that's starting to remember what it might be like to stop performing that functionality so carefully.
For decades, maybe, you've been managing yourself. Managing your moods, your cycles, your energy, your needs. You learned to override the body's signals when they were inconvenient (which was most of the time). You learned to push through exhaustion, to smile through discomfort, to regulate your emotions so they didn't leak out at inappropriate moments.
Perimenopause strips that capacity away. Not all at once, but in waves. Your body stops cooperating with the override function. The emotions leak. The exhaustion can't be pushed through. The careful management system you built (the one that let you be professional, reliable, the one who has it together) starts glitching.
And this feels like failure. Like you're falling apart. Like everyone else is managing and you're the one who can't keep it together.
But what if it's not failure? What if your body is done being managed? What if it's asking—demanding, really—that you stop overriding it, stop pushing through it, stop asking it to be predictable and compliant when it's trying to become something different?
This doesn't mean you have to quit your job or blow up your life (though some people do, and that's its own conversation). It means you're being asked to renegotiate the terms. To stop managing yourself quite so carefully. To let the wildness show up in small ways: the honest answer instead of the polite one, the afternoon when you just can't, the admission that you don't actually know what you want yet but you're tired of pretending you do.
Living in the Uncertainty
The Moon doesn't give you a roadmap. It gives you a landscape that refuses to stay still, creatures that are both tame and wild, water that reflects without revealing. It says: you're going to have to feel your way through this.
This is almost offensive in a culture that treats the body as a machine to be maintained and optimized. We want protocols. We want to know that if we do X and Y, we'll get Z. Perimenopause laughs at this. Your friend's experience tells you almost nothing about what yours will be. The timeline is different for everyone. The symptoms are different. The meaning is different.
What you do have is this: a body that has carried you through every other transition you've survived. A body that learned to regulate its temperature when you were born, learned to walk, learned to menstruate, learned to heal from injuries and heartbreaks. Your body has always known how to become something it wasn't before.
It's doing that now. It's just that this time, it's doing it in the dark, by moonlight, and you can't see where you're going.
Perimenopause strips away a particular kind of confidence; the confidence that comes from predictability, from knowing how your body will respond, from being able to plan around your cycles and your energy. For a while, you lose that. The rhythms you relied on dissolve. You can't predict when you'll feel clear or clouded, energized or depleted, emotionally steady or rawly open.
And into that loss of predictability, something else can arrive: a different kind of knowing. The kind that comes not from controlling the body but from listening to it. Not from managing the transition but from following it where it wants to go.
Tracking without controlling
Start noticing patterns without trying to fix them. Not to optimize, just to observe:
What time of day do you feel most clear? What helps you sleep, even a little? What makes the hot flashes worse (if anything)? What makes you feel more like yourself?
You're not looking for solutions. You're just gathering data about this body, in this transition, right now.
What Comes After the Moon
The Moon is card XVIII in the major arcana. What comes after it? The Sun—card XIX, all clarity and warmth and visible truth. But you can't get to the Sun without going through the Moon first.
You can't get to the post-menopausal phase—the phase where so many people report feeling more themselves than they ever have, more free, more clear about what matters—without first going through this dark, confusing passage.
Perimenopause is the Moon phase. It's the in-between. It's the not-knowing. It's your body asking you to trust it in the dark, to follow it through territory that has no map, to let it dismantle and rebuild itself without your supervision.
And maybe that's the real wisdom here: that some transformations can't be understood while they're happening. They can only be survived, and then later, when you're standing in the full light of what you've become, you'll look back at this passage and understand what it was teaching you all along.
Which is that you were never as fragile as you feared. That your body was never betraying you—it was freeing you. That the wildness you were so afraid of was exactly what you needed to remember how to trust yourself again.
The Moon doesn't promise you easy. It promises you true. And perimenopause, for all its difficulty and strangeness and disorientation, is nothing if not that: brutally, beautifully, necessarily true.
Working With the Moon Phase: Practices for Perimenopause
These aren't fixes. They're ways to be with the transition instead of fighting it.
When you're in the hot flash: Don't fight it. Track where it starts in your body. Notice it move. Breathe with it. You're not trying to make it stop—you're just staying present with your body while it does what it needs to do. (Somatic awareness)
When the brain fog hits: The fog isn't failure. It's your brain reorganizing. When you can't find a word, instead of spiraling into "I'm losing my mind," try: "My brain is doing construction right now. The word will come back when it's ready." (Cognitive reframing - CBT)
When you're caught in the uncertainty: Make a list of things that help you feel even 2% more grounded. Not things that fix it—just things that make it slightly more bearable. A specific playlist. Walking barefoot. Texting a friend who gets it. Keep the list somewhere you can see it. (Distress tolerance - DBT)
When you need to trust the process: Ask yourself: "What do I want this next phase to feel like?" What quality of life are you moving toward? Write it down. Let it be your north star when everything else feels uncertain. (Values clarification - ACT)
Body check-in practice: Once a day (or whenever you remember), if you can, place both hands on your body. Take three breaths. Ask: "What does my body need right now?" Sometimes it's water. Sometimes it's rest. Sometimes it's just acknowledgment that this is hard.
The Moon doesn't promise you'll figure it out. You might not “figure it out.” You might just move through it and look back later and realize you survived it without ever fully understanding it. And that’s okay too.
