Portland looked like summer. Café doors open, sunlight pooling on the sidewalk, people moving as if the day had neither weight nor consequence. But for me, it wasn’t just a summer afternoon. It was split-screen.

Perimenopause is the clearest proof I have that transition isn’t linear—and that change often includes grief. You can wake up and feel like yourself—clear, capable, even a little brave—and by evening feel like your body has changed the rules again. Heat rises. Sleep splinters. Focus slips. Even your own scent can feel unfamiliar.

If productivity were the measure of readiness, I’d be fine. I can produce. I can teach. I can create. I can deliver. You’re probably not surprised; you may have even watched me do it. But put a simple life-logistics task in front of me—sign the estate documents, open the mail, handle the thing that makes adulthood obligations feel real—and suddenly I lose traction. My competence doesn’t translate.

Let’s start with a simple question: how are you right now? Not in your life or location, but in your body. Before you answer with a story, take a moment and scan for signals… Do you feel tense and tight? Jittery and braced? Or slow and heavy—like your energy is running on a dimmer switch? Or are you steady enough to stay grounded, even as the terrain shifts beneath you?

There’s a particular strangeness to this week on the calendar. It’s late December—the days between one year and the next. Not quite holiday. Not quite “back to it.” Calendars clear just enough for white space to appear. The inbox quiets down. Meetings fall away.

The first time Isamu was admitted to the UCSF Medical Center, I left the hospital at 3:00 in the morning, carrying his absence in a plastic tote bag. His jeans. The T-shirt and flannel he'd arrived in. His socks and shoes, still holding the shape of his feet. The nurse had helped me peel his clothes off earlier that night, when his headache became unbearable and he could no longer sit upright without vomiting.

Across cultures, continents, and centuries, people have always made maps of the territory of transition. Birth, adolescence, partnership, death—these were never meant to be private experiences. They were marked, named, and held in community. They were marked, named, and held in community.

The body often knows before we do. An email lands, a conversation shifts, a familiar rhythm we've relied on starts to fray. And even before we name it as an ending, something in us has already registered the change, signaling that we've stepped out of accustomed territory and into the unknown. Sleep patterns break. Appetite loses its usual shape. There's a hum of vigilance just under the skin.

The body tells the truth about change before the mind has words for it: sleep alters, appetite wobbles, attention narrows or scatters. That's because transition isn't just an event; its a process with its own anatomy. Something ends. There's a middle that asks more of us than we first imagined.