This could very well be the last hamburger I ever eat. Ever since my teen years, even when otherwise a vegan, I’ve had a burger once a month—and you know what time of the month I’m talking about. My menopause dovetailed with the pandemic—nothing like a hormonal shitstorm in an incubation tank—so this is the first burger I’ve needed in months. I celebrated with a whiskey and the premiere of And Just Like That, which leans as hard into the beautiful melancholy of middle age as I do.
I never thought I’d mourn menstruation but over the years I grew grateful for its regulated highs and lows, for a clock and calendar that was my very own. Bidding farewell to my period is bidding farewell to youth, once and for all. And that is proving way harder than I thought, because mortality has never loomed larger. (We’ve all been experiencing that lately.) I send every other middle-aged broad a bite of this burger. We fucking earned it just by sticking around in a world that rarely recognizes how beautiful we are.
This could very well be the last hamburger I ever eat. Ever since my teen years, even when otherwise a vegan, I’ve had a burger once a month—and you know what time of the month I’m talking about. My menopause dovetailed with the pandemic—nothing like a hormonal shitstorm in an incubation tank—so this is the first burger I’ve needed in months. I celebrated with a whiskey and the premiere of And Just Like That, which leans as hard into the beautiful melancholy of middle age as I do.
I never thought I’d mourn menstruation but over the years I grew grateful for its regulated highs and lows, for a clock and calendar that was my very own. Bidding farewell to my period is bidding farewell to youth, once and for all. And that is proving way harder than I thought, because mortality has never loomed larger. (We’ve all been experiencing that lately.) I send every other middle-aged broad a bite of this burger. We fucking earned it just by sticking around in a world that rarely recognizes how beautiful we are.