Erin Beattie is a communications strategist and founder of Nila, a research and community platform for perimenopause and menopause inspired by her own experience with endometriosis, cancer, and chemical and surgical menopause. When she's not writing or building community, you'll find her walking with her chocolate lab, Bear, and encouraging women to stay connected, keep moving, and support one another through every stage of life.
The first time someone said “you’re fine” to me after cancer, I almost believed them.
The scans were clear. The margins were clean. The appointments were spacing out. From the outside, the emergency was over, and people were ready to hand me back to my regular life.
The trouble was, my regular life had been rearranged.
I didn’t get to ease into menopause. Treatment pushed me into chemical menopause almost overnight, and then surgery finished the job. A hysterectomy with my ovaries removed doesn’t allow for a gradual transition. It’s abrupt. Most people experience these changes over years, but I went through them in a single week. This happened while my body was still healing from a bilateral mastectomy and dealing with eighteen years of undiagnosed endometriosis. Pain, decision fatigue, yada yada.
I’ve written before that my body had never been exaggerating. It had been reporting. I want to say that line again here, because it’s the one that keeps teaching me things on the other side, too. The reporting didn’t stop when the periods did.
The Part Nobody Maps Out
Menopause is technically one day. Twelve months without a period, and the label lands. Everything after that is postmenopause, and for a lot of us that’s thirty or forty years. Basically the rest of our lives.
Here’s what I didn’t know going in: the other side isn’t a flat line. It isn’t the credits rolling. It’s a new baseline, lower and steadier, and a long list of things that keep going, or quietly start, or come back in shapes you don’t recognize.
Some of it lifts. The volatility that wrecked my sleep and mood in perimenopause — that part does settle. For most people, brain fog eases back toward baseline. I’m grateful for that. But I’m only a year into it. This isn’t in my rearview mirror. I’m still in the thick of it. The rage is real, and it’s not just mood swings. It’s a kind of heat that sits just under my skin, sometimes without warning. It hasn’t settled yet, but I’m working on it. I’m learning. I’m adapting. That hope helps, but I’m not there yet.
And some of it doesn’t lift. It just changes form.
I still have hot flashes. Not like they did in the thick of it, but they’re not gone, and they don’t follow any schedule I can plan around. The research backs me up on this, which I keep having to remind myself is not a comfort I should need: the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation followed thousands of women for over a decade and found a median of 7.4 years of vasomotor symptoms, with about a third of women still having them more than ten years past their final period. I’m not an outlier. I’m the third; this keeps happening to me.
There are also tissue changes. Vaginal and urinary symptoms show up later, after systemic estrogen's been low for a while, and they don’t resolve on their own. I use local estrogen, and I'll continue for as long as I want comfort, which is, honestly, indefinitely. This is one of the most treatable parts of the story, yet it’s often undertreated because few people ask about it, including sometimes doctors. Now, I make sure to ask.
And there’s the long-game part, the quiet damage you can’t feel. Bone loss accelerates in the first five to ten years after your final period. Heart disease risk catches up to men’s by your seventies, and heart disease, not breast cancer, is the leading cause of death in postmenopausal women. I had surgical menopause, and the earlier it happens, the harder and faster that clock runs. So strength training twice a week isn’t optional for me anymore. It isn’t about how I look. It’s about whether my skeleton holds.
None of this is a tragedy. It’s just very ordinary, and almost nobody told me any of it.
What I’m Still Learning to Ask
I’m on local estrogen. Systemic HRT is still an open question for me, not a door closed, not a door open either, just something I live in the in-between of, like a lot of people navigating this after cancer. I bring it up at appointments now. I bring my questions written down. I bring someone when I can.
I used to cry in the car after appointments because I’d forget the questions that truly scared me—the ones I typed at 2 a.m. and deleted because they seemed unimportant. I don’t do that as much anymore. The questions haven’t gotten smaller, but now I write them down instead of trying to remember everything. This way, appointments can start past the usual “So, what brings you in today?”
That’s a small thing. It changed everything.
Nobody Does This Alone
I got through cancer because of a group chat, a dragon boat, a race I now help run, and a few hiking buddies who notice when I go quiet. Twenty women in the same boat, literally, who already know the backstory. We just paddle.
Menopause didn’t have a boat. I looked for the same kind of community, the kind that carries you when you can’t carry yourself, but I couldn’t find it. There was no group chat, no race, just a lot of notes and unorganized screenshots.
So I built Nila, partly because I needed it, and partly because I’d already learned, the hard way, that what gets you through is almost never the protocol. It’s the person beside you who doesn’t need the backstory.
The November Challenge
Here’s where the movement piece comes in.
This November, I’m joining a Sole Sister Ramblers Challenge. I’m not going to lay out the whole thing here, partly because you should come and see it for yourself, and partly because the point of a Challenge isn’t reading about it. It’s showing up.
What I’ll tell you: it’s virtual, it’s run in a WhatsApp group full of women who cheer each other on through midlife and beyond, and it’s built around the kind of low-key, unglamorous consistency that has carried me through more hard weeks than almost anything else. The kind where you show up, check in, and notice when one of you goes quiet for too long.
If you’ve been waiting for a reason to move, or a reason to stop doing it alone, this is a gentle one. I’ll be there.
If you want to know more about what’s actually going on in your body on this side of the line, I wrote the whole map here, sources and all.
And if you want to know how I got here, the honest version is on the about page. There’s no triumph in it. There’s just a woman who kept showing up.
If today’s the day you finally name what’s happening on the other side, that’s enough for today. The rest can come next.
Links:
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The postmenopause pathway (the honest map): https://hellonila.com/pathways/postmenopause
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About Nila, and how I got here: https://hellonila.com/about
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Sole Sister Ramblers Virtual Challenges (November): https://solesisterramblers.com/pages/virtual-fitness-lifestyle-challenge
Sources:
Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN), vasomotor symptom duration: median 7.4 years total, ~4.5 years past final menstrual period, ~1 in 3 women with moderate-to-severe symptoms 10+ years past FMP.
Avis NE, et al. Menopause. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1097/GME.0000000000000526
Bone loss accelerates in the first 5 to 10 years post-FMP (~1 to 2% per year), slowing thereafter; ~half of women have osteoporosis by age 80.
North American Menopause Society. Management of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. Menopause. 2010. https://www.menopause.org/docs/default-source/2010/nams-2010-osteoporosis-position-statement.pdf
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in postmenopausal women;
READ MORE > Her Story, Rambler Cafe Blog
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