You Were Not Broken—You Were Unfinished: Healing Shame in Perimenopause

If you are in perimenopause and you find yourself looking back at the woman you were with grief, regret, or even shame, I want to offer you a different way of seeing her.

The woman you were was not wrong. She was not broken. She was not a failure. She was…Unfinished. And there is a profound difference between these things.

Many women in this stage of life carry a painful narrative about their past selves. They look back at the people-pleaser, the over-giver, the one who stayed too long in relationships or jobs or situations that were not serving her. They see the woman who put everyone else first, who ignored her own needs, who made herself small to keep the peace. And they feel angry at her. Or ashamed of her. Or disappointed that she was not wiser, stronger, braver.

But that woman was doing exactly what she needed to do at that stage of her development. She was not weak, foolish, or misguided. She was the caterpillar. And the caterpillar is not a failed butterfly.

🦋The caterpillar is the necessary predecessor to the butterfly.

You cannot become the woman you are now without having been the woman you were then. And carrying shame or regret about your past self is like being angry at the caterpillar for not having wings.

The caterpillar has a very specific job. She crawls. She consumes. She builds mass. She does not fail because she is not yet a butterfly. The caterpillar succeeds by being exactly what she is meant to be at that stage of the journey.

The woman you were in your 20s, your 30s, your early 40s was doing her job. She was learning. She was building. She was gathering the raw material that would eventually be transformed into wisdom.

The people-pleasing taught you about boundaries and what happens when you do not have them. The over-giving taught you about reciprocity and what it feels like when relationships are one-sided. The staying too long taught you about your own capacity for endurance and also about the cost of loyalty that is not met with respect.

All of those experiences were necessary— not because they were good or because they were what you deserved, but because they were what taught you what you needed to learn in order to become who you are now. ✨

You did not fail by being the woman you were. You were unfinished. And unfinished is not the same thing as wrong.

The grief you feel about the time you lost, the opportunities you missed, the relationships you stayed in too long is real. And it is allowed. You are allowed to grieve the woman you were. You are allowed to wish you had known then what you know now.

But I am asking you to hold that grief with compassion rather than shame. Because shame says you were wrong, you were broken, you should have known better. And compassion says you were doing the best you could with what you knew and what you had at that time.

Perimenopause is your chrysalis. It is the stage where the woman you were is being dissolved so that the woman you are becoming can be built. And that dissolution is painful. It feels like lossn because it is loss! You are losing the identity, the capacity, and the way of being that defined you for decades.

But you are not losing yourself. You are TRANSFORMING yourself. And the woman who emerges from this chrysalis is wiser, clearer, more powerful, more aligned with her truth. She knows who she is and what she will no longer tolerate. She is no longer the caterpillar crawling through life trying to please everyone. She is the butterfly, fully expressed and unapologetically herself.

BOOM! Take it. Receive it. Believe it.

The woman you were was not wrong. She was unfinished. She was doing her job. She was gathering the experiences, learning the lessons, and building the foundation that the woman you are now gets to stand on. And she deserves your compassion, not your shame.

If you are shaming your past self and you want to start honoring the transformation you are in, I would love to support you. Send me a DM and let’s talk about where you are and where you want to go. We’ll see how I can help you through the chrysalis and to the other side.