I came to this work through a life that has required me to understand what happens when the conditions around us change, but the ways we have learned to live within them do not. 

For many years, I knew how to push through, rise to the moment, take responsibility, and support other people. I could manage a great deal and often did. But over time, I began to recognize that some of what I had learned to call strength, responsibility, and resilience came with costs I could no longer ignore.

Midlife brought many of those questions into sharper focus.

Perimenopause changed my body, my capacity, and my relationship to things I had previously taken for granted. It raised new questions about what I needed, what worked for me, what I believed, what I was willing to accept, and how I wanted to live.

Looking for answers opened up even more questions.

I found useful information and resources, but no single source could tell me what any of it meant within the context of my life. What I knew from my own experience mattered. So did what I was learning. So did my circumstances, relationships, responsibilities, values, culture, resources, and the systems I had to navigate.

I began to see more clearly how much of our lives gets separated into pieces that are deeply connected.

Health is treated as one thing. Work as another. Relationships, money, identity, sexuality, family, culture, and emotional life are placed in their own categories. Yet we don't experience our lives that way. A change in one place reaches into another. A choice that makes sense on paper still has to work within the conditions of an actual life.

That understanding changed the way I thought about support.

I became less interested in asking how people could become better at adapting themselves to whatever circumstances they encountered and more interested in what becomes possible when we also examine the circumstances, structures, relationships, resources, and assumptions surrounding them.

That is part of what brought me to the work I do today.

My work with Black and Brown women navigating perimenopause and menopause grows from that understanding: that what is happening in our bodies is connected to the rest of our lives, that what we already know matters alongside what we are learning, and that meaningful change involves more than telling someone what she should do.