The Fog Nobody Warned Me About: What Menopause Taught Me About Clutter, Identity, & the Home I Actually Need Now
Somewhere in my forties, I started losing words mid-sentence. Not big words. Small, ordinary ones, the name of a client I'd talked to an hour earlier, the word for the thing you pour coffee into. I'd stand there mid-conversation, reaching for it, and it just wasn't there. I chalked it up to being busy. Then to getting older. It took me a long time to connect it to what was actually happening in my body.
I wasn't losing my mind. I was losing estrogen.
It's not just brain fog. It's an executive function challenge.
When I began interviewing guests for the Grandma Has ADHD podcast and researching for my book, This Explains So Much, I learned women are most likely to be diagnosed with ADHD when a child is diagnosed or when perimenopause comes in and hits you like a stick. Estrogen is pro-cognitive. When it's higher, we think more clearly. When it drops, and it drops hard and unevenly through perimenopause and menopause, it's not just memory that takes the hit. It's the executive function, the system in your brain that plans, prioritizes, starts, and follows through. For women who already had undiagnosed ADHD, menopause doesn't create that struggle. It exposes one that was there all along, or turns the volume up on it.
Here's why that matters far beyond forgetting a word. Executive function is what lets you look at a garage full of boxes and decide where to start. It's what lets you open a closet, make fifty small decisions in a row, and actually finish the drawer instead of shutting it and walking away. When that system is running on less fuel, clutter doesn't happen because you're lazy or undisciplined. It happens because deciding is the hard part, and deciding is exactly what got harder.
A transition, not an event
Menopause isn't a single day. It's a transition, often a long one, that can stretch across years before you ever reach the point that makes it official. And like every other transition I've spent my career sitting with clients through, from empty nests to downsizing to moving a parent into assisted living, the hardest part usually isn't the biology. It's the identity questions underneath it. Who am I now that my body doesn't work quite the way it used to? Who am I now that this next phase is starting whether I'm ready or not?
This is a transition I am personally facing as I not only become menopausal but as my youngest child leaves the nest and I become what my friend Chantale Bordonaro, owner of Simplicity Source labels a “free bird”.
These are the same questions I hear from my friends and clients.
Your home starts asking questions too
Somewhere in the middle of all this, your home starts changing right along with you. Hot flashes and night sweats make you rethink your bedroom, your bedding, even which side of the house gets the afternoon sun. Sleep disruption changes what your space needs to do for you. Joints that ache differently make you notice the stairs in a way you never used to. And the clutter that's been slowly accumulating for years suddenly feels heavier, because you have less bandwidth to manage it and less patience for things that don't serve the life you're actually living now.
That's often the moment people start asking themselves whether the home that made sense for the last chapter still makes sense for this one. Not because anything dramatic happened. Just because their needs changed, and their space didn't.
It was never about being disorganized
This is the same thing I tell every client who comes to us feeling like they should be able to handle a move or a closet or a garage on their own, and can't figure out why they're stuck. A house full of decades of belongings is genuinely hard to sort through, box by box, decision by decision. Add a brain that's navigating hormonal fog and executive function running on empty, and it makes complete sense that people freeze.
And for women who are the executive functioner of the household, the disorganization feels like a personal failure. What it actually is though is biology plus an overloaded season of life, and it's exactly why nobody should do it alone.
Whether you find a friend or hire a professional, making the decisions easier makes the whole process easier.
This is why not only do I train the Silver Linings Transitions team on the “how” to organize but on the “why” we struggle. We meet people where they are instead of judging how they got there. Whatever is driving the overwhelm, whether it's grief, ADHD, menopause, or all three tangled together, our job is to help you make the decisions your brain doesn't have the bandwidth for right now, and to help your home catch up to who you actually are today.
Perfect is the enemy of done. You don't have to have the words, the energy, or the whole plan figured out. You just have to start, and you don't have to start alone.
