The Loss Women Mourn Is Not Their Memory

Memory is often the first thing women mention when they talk to me about perimenopause.

The forgotten appointment.

The missing word, sitting just out of reach.

The conversation that disappears halfway through a sentence.

The moment of standing in a room, keys in hand, with no idea why you walked in.

Most women have a word for all of this already: brain fog. It's a good word, because it captures a lot at once - the slowness, the fuzziness, the way concentration, word-finding and planning can all feel harder.

Brain fog is a big, tangled thing, and it deserves its own issue later on. For now, I want to pull out just one thread of it: memory specifically, and what losing your grip on it seems to take from you that has nothing to do with memory at all.

Some women describe moments like this: filling out a simple form, a decade of leadership experience behind them, and for a few seconds the words for their own address aren't there. Not a stranger's address - their own. It's often told with a laugh.

But it isn't really a laugh.

These moments can be unsettling, sometimes frightening, especially if you've spent much of your life relying on your ability to keep on top of things.

But in my experience, the distress you feel usually isn't only about memory. It's about what memory has come to represent.

Forgetting a name is one thing. Forgetting a name when you've always been the person who remembers is something else entirely. For some women the practical difficulty is fairly manageable. For others - especially those who've spent years quietly outworking a brain that never made this easy - the practical difficulty was never small to begin with.

Either way, it's usually the meaning you attach to the forgetting that hurts the most.

The Practical Loss and the Personal Loss

Memory lapses create real, practical problems. Tasks take longer. Concentration becomes less reliable. More things need to be written down. Systems that once ran on autopilot now need conscious attention, every time. That's genuinely frustrating, and genuinely exhausting - I don't want to minimise that.

But alongside it, there's often something quieter running underneath: a sense that the version of yourself you've relied on for years is becoming harder to reach. This is usually the part that's hardest to put into words.

Because what's actually being mourned isn't only function. It's identity.

If you have ADHD, this particular loss can cut deeper still. What's faltering now was never just memory - it was scaffolding you'd built, consciously or not, to keep a life running despite a brain that didn't file things the way other people's seemed to. That scaffolding worked for years, sometimes for decades, and it worked well enough that even you may have stopped seeing it as effort at all.

The hormonal shifts of perimenopause interact directly with dopamine, which is central to memory and attention - so it's not a coincidence that scaffolding built around exactly those things would be the first to feel the strain.

When perimenopause disrupts it, you're not just losing memory. You're losing a support you'd quietly relied on since long before this stage of life began, whether or not you'd ever put a name to it.

The Person You Have Always Been

Most of us don't build identity from abstract ideas. We build it from repeated experience -from what we consistently do, what others come to expect of us, the roles we occupy over years without ever quite deciding to.

I am organised. I am reliable. I am the person who remembers.

At some point these stop feeling like descriptions and start feeling like facts. You become known as the one who remembers birthdays, tracks the details, notices what everyone else missed. And once you're known for something long enough, it stops feeling like a behaviour and starts feeling like who you are.

The line between what you do and who you are gets very hard to see.

The phrase I hear most often isn't "the one who remembers everything." It's "the organised one." It sounds smaller, almost like a compliment you'd shrug off. But for a lot of women, especially those with ADHD or a lifetime of anxiety running alongside it, "organised" was never really about memory at all. Memory itself may have been unreliable for years, maybe always.

What did the work instead was vigilance - the checking, the double-checking, the mental walk-throughs, the refusal to fully trust that anything would simply be remembered on its own. That vigilance was so constant, and so effective, that from the outside it looked exactly like a good memory.

The drop in oestrogen during perimenopause makes memory itself harder still, which is real and worth naming on its own. But for many women, the struggle underneath it isn't new. It's just no longer being covered for as well as it used to be.

Maybe you recognise yourself in this:

The alarms set for your alarms.

The photo taken of where you parked, just in case.

The text sent to yourself because you'd stopped trusting your own memory to hold on to things.

You may have built that system so early, and so thoroughly, that you never once thought of it as compensating. It was simply who you were - the organised one, the reliable one.

So when the system starts to slip, what's shaken isn't just your memory. It's the question of who you are without it.

The Invisible Contract

For many women, competence stops being just a skill and becomes part of how relationships are organised. Families depend on it. Workplaces expect it. An invisible contract forms, one that's rarely spoken aloud: I will remember. I will keep track. I will hold this together.

You didn't sign this. Nobody read you the terms. It simply accumulated - reinforced by repetition, by gratitude, by expectation - until it felt less like a contract and more like the weather. Which is exactly why a change in memory can feel disproportionately emotional.

What's actually being disrupted isn't only a cognitive process.

It's a role you didn't know you'd agreed to hold.

The Story Beneath the Symptom

When memory becomes less reliable, the natural questions are practical ones: why am I forgetting things, why can't I think clearly, why does everything take longer than it used to. Most women land on one phrase that covers all of it at once: my brain doesn't work anymore. It's rarely meant literally, and it's almost never really about the brain in isolation.

But underneath it, there's usually a quieter, sharper question: Who am I if I can't do this the way I always have?

If your identity has been closely tied to competence, memory changes can start to feel like evidence that something fundamental is shifting - not just what you can do, but who you are.

If you have ADHD, that question can carry an extra layer: I built my sense of competence by outworking a brain that made this harder than it looked from the outside - so what does it mean if the outworking stops being enough? 

This is where the distress tends to deepen. Not only in the symptom, but in what the symptom seems to mean.

If memory has become part of the story you tell about yourself, any change to it can feel like a change in self - even when that interpretation isn't accurate.

When Identity Meets Change

Most of us assume identity is fixed - something we discover once and then carry forward unchanged. In practice, it's far more adaptive than that. Many of the qualities you think of as personality are really ways of creating safety, belonging, predictability, that developed over years of practice.

What begins as adaptation quietly becomes identity. And once it's identity, it's genuinely hard to imagine yourself without it.

This is part of why this stage can feel so disorientating - not because it tells you who you are, but because it interrupts your certainty about who you'd believed yourself to be.

The disruption isn't only practical.

It's existential, whether or not anyone around you would use that word for it.

What the Loss May Be Showing

This is one reason grief can show up in unexpected forms during perimenopause - not only grief for what feels harder now, but grief for who you thought you were, or who you thought you had to be. The woman who never forgot. The woman who always coped. The woman who could be relied on no matter what was happening in her own life, often while nobody asked what that was costing her.

If you have ADHD, there's often a particular version of this grief too: for the woman who built entire systems just to keep up, and who rarely got to find out what it might feel like to keep up with ease.

For years, that pressure stayed invisible, mostly because you had enough capacity to absorb it without anyone - including you - noticing it was there.

When that capacity shifts, the pressure becomes visible for the first time. And what first looks like decline may also be showing you something else: not only what's become harder - what's been required of you all along.

The Question Beneath the Question

When you say you miss who you used to be, you're rarely talking only about memory. You're talking about certainty - certainty about your competence, your reliability, how you fit into the people and places around you. And certainty is a genuinely hard thing to lose, particularly after decades of it being part of how you knew yourself.

But identity is not the same thing as function.

When function changes, identity doesn't have to disappear with it - even if, at first, it very much feels that way.

The Possibility Inside the Shift

Most of us respond to this kind of disruption by trying to restore what feels familiar - to get back to the version of ourselves that felt capable and certain. That's a completely understandable response. But over time, I've watched another possibility emerge for a lot of women.

Not that the old identity was wrong. That it may have been incomplete.

That beneath the woman who remembered everything was a woman carrying more than anyone could see.

That beneath the woman who always coped was a woman spending more effort than anyone knew, including, most of the time, her.

That beneath the woman who held everything together was a woman who had rarely, if ever, been asked what holding it together had cost her.

And if she also has ADHD, that beneath the woman who never seemed to forget was a woman who had spent years quietly building the very systems now under strain - systems so practiced that even she had stopped seeing them as effort at all.

Sometimes the work of this stage isn't rebuilding the old identity exactly as it was. It's getting curious about what else might be true - about who you are beyond the role, beyond the function, beyond the certainty. Because when certainty loosens, something else quietly becomes possible.

Not the loss of self.

The expansion of it.

The examples in this article are illustrative and draw on common experiences associated with ADHD and perimenopause. They are not accounts of individual clients.