Mind the Gap and I’ll Help You Bridge It
Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by the meaning of words. Perhaps this started because the name my parents gave me – Oda- was almost always unfamiliar to people. I had to translate it, explain it, and over the years, I discovered that in different languages and cultures, my name held surprising associations, sometimes linked to powerful women who carried it before me.
This early experience taught me that words are never just words; they carry meaning. They shape not only how others see us, but how we see ourselves and how we understand the world. When words are introduced from the outside, they can quietly seep into our inner landscape, sometimes becoming the lenses through which we view our lives.
Take menopause. For millennia, it was known as the climacteric, derived from the ancient Greek klimakter, meaning “a rung of a ladder,” referring to a time of natural transition. This term was used in Western medical writing well into the 20th century. Only in 1984 did the word perimenopause appear, coined by a male doctor. With that single prefix, peri, “around”, a new narrative was born: the notion of a drawn-out “syndrome” with symptoms to be managed, problems to be fixed, deficits to be supplemented.
As Susun Weed wisely points out, there is no peri-puberty. Nobody expects menstruation to arrive overnight, and nobody questions that it takes time for cycles to establish themselves. Why would it be any different when they begin to fade, after four decades of regularity?
Wouldn’t it be far stranger if one day they were… gone?
Yet once we are taught to believe this process is pathological, that our bodies are failing us, we start to feel exactly that way: broken, incomplete.
Western and traditional Eastern medicine- TCM alike often describe menopause in the language of depletion, lack of hormones, lack of jing, lack of blood. In truth, this is the season of profound transformation.
The huge gap between the name the world gives this transition and what it actually is is the heart of the problem.
This is why I have created my talks, my new platform as a menopause doula, my women’s circles and workshops.
To mind the gap.
To help build the bridge.
So that together, we can step into a new land.
Beyond the fertile years.
A land where no woman feels she has to apologize for changing.
A land where nobody tells her she is less than a beautiful wholeness.
That is a journey we need to embark on, and I would be honored to walk it with you.
With love,
Oda