It’s the third planner this year, open on the counter to a week you already lost track of. You used to run all of it from memory, the appointments, the refills, everyone’s schedules, and it held for thirty years. It started coming apart around the same time the night sweats did, and you’ve spent every year since sure you were just losing your edge.
There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called What Changed Around Fifty. It walks you through what got harder and when, so you can see that it all started around menopause, instead of feeling like one more thing you failed at.
Why it got harder
Our brains run low on dopamine, the chemical that helps us start things, stick with them, and feel like they are worth doing. What almost no one explains is that estrogen had been helping that dopamine work. You can see it in women without ADHD too: as estrogen rises and falls across the month, their drive rises and falls with it, which …
