A Personal Story

I didn’t feel like myself anymore. It was like I slowly disappeared.

For almost two years, I had no idea what was happening to me. If any of this sounds familiar, please read to the end.

I want to start with a small moment, because that’s how it started for me. Not with anything dramatic.

I walked into my kitchen one afternoon and stopped dead in the middle of the room, because I had no idea why I’d gone in there. I stood there. Nothing came. I went back out, sat down, and a few minutes later did the exact same thing again.

If you’re reading this, I have a feeling you already know what I’m describing. The word that’s right there, that you can see in your head, but can’t get your mouth to say. Reading the same paragraph four times and still not knowing what it said. Walking into rooms and forgetting. Starting a sentence and losing the end of it halfway through.

It didn’t happen overnight for me. That’s the part nobody warns you about. There was no single morning where I woke up different. It crept in so slowly that for a long time I just thought I was tired, or stressed, or getting old, or honestly, that I was a little bit broken.

By the time I understood what was going on, I’d already lost about two years of my life to it.

The part I’m almost embarrassed to admit

I’m going to be honest about how bad it got, because I needed someone to be honest with me back then, and nobody was.

The brain fog scared me the most. I’d always been the sharp one. Quick. The person who could hold three conversations and remember everyone’s coffee order. And then one year I couldn’t finish a thought. I’d say whole sentences backwards. I stopped reading books, which broke my heart a little, because I’d been a reader my entire life.

I was up at two in the morning more than once, Googling “early onset Alzheimer’s” and “brain tumor symptoms,” fully convinced something was seriously wrong with me. That’s not an exaggeration. I genuinely thought I was getting sick.

Then there was the temper. I’d snap at my kids over nothing. The wrong cup, a noise, a question asked twice. And then I’d go cry in the bathroom afterward because I could hear myself doing it and couldn’t stop. I love my husband more than anything, and there were weeks I was so short with him that I think he wondered if I hated him. I didn’t. I hated whatever I’d turned into.

And underneath all of that anger, there was something that frightened me more, because it was the opposite. Some days I felt nothing at all.

Not sad. Not depressed. Just... nothing. No joy, no excitement, no real opinions about anything. People would ask what I wanted for dinner and I genuinely didn’t care. I let the garden I used to love go to weeds. Friends would text me and I’d stare at the message for a week before I could make myself answer, if I answered at all. I described it to myself once as a blank wall. Not a dark hole you fall into. Just a flat, blank wall where the rest of me used to be.

I was still showing up. Still doing the school run, still at work, still cooking. But inside I was just performing as myself. Going through the motions of a woman who used to live in this body.

My periods turned into something I had to plan my entire month around. The exhaustion wasn’t normal tiredness, it was a wall that hit me at two in the afternoon and put me flat on the couch. My clothes stopped fitting the way they used to no matter what I did. My hair was thinning. My skin was breaking out like I was fifteen again. At one point I didn’t even smell like myself, and I hated it.

I looked in the mirror and could not find the woman who used to be there.

The appointment that made it worse

So I did the thing you’re supposed to do. I went to my doctor.

I’d worked myself up to it for weeks, and then I sat in that office and cried while I tried to explain that I didn’t feel like a person anymore. And I got told I was “too young for that.” That it was “probably just stress.” No bloodwork. No real questions. I walked out feeling smaller than when I walked in, half-convinced I’d made the whole thing up, like maybe I really was just losing my mind.

If that’s happened to you, I am so sorry. Being dismissed when you’re already that low does something to you. It made me feel invisible. It made me angry in a way I didn’t have the energy to be.

That appointment was the moment I decided I was going to have to figure this out by myself.

When it finally got a name

It was a comment on a thread, of all things. A woman around my age listing her symptoms, and it was like reading my own diary. Someone replied with one word I’d barely heard before: perimenopause.

I went down a rabbit hole that night and I cried again, but for a completely different reason this time. There were thousands of women describing the exact things I’d been too scared to say out loud. The fog. The rage. The “I just feel empty.” The “I don’t recognize myself.” One of them wrote that she missed the rage, because at least the rage made her feel alive. I knew exactly what she meant.

I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t too young. And I wasn’t the only one. After two years, that alone felt like air.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you in that first relief: having a name for it doesn’t fix it.

I looked into HRT, and I’m not against it at all. For some women it’s life-changing. But it’s not easy to get when your doctor won’t even run a panel, it’s not right for everyone, and from what I read, plenty of women are on it and still feel flat. I wanted something I could start now. Something that was in my control, that didn’t depend on convincing a doctor to take me seriously.

What I actually tried (and what I almost didn’t)

You’ve probably seen the ads. I certainly had, for months, scrolling right past them. The viral beef organ supplement. The famous one with the crown on the bottle that every influencer is suddenly talking about. I’d rolled my eyes every single time. Beef organs? No thank you.

But once I actually stopped and read why women were taking them, it started to make an odd kind of sense. Years of heavy periods and just-surviving had left me running on empty, and organ meats are about the most nutrient-dense food there is. Iron. B12. The exact stuff my body had been screaming for. Our grandmothers ate this way without thinking twice about it. We’re the ones who stopped.

So I almost bought the famous one. And then I saw the price. Sixty dollars. For a month. On a subscription. On something that might do absolutely nothing, when my body is weird and supplements have let me down before. I couldn’t make myself do it.

That’s when I went looking for a version I could actually afford to test, and found a women’s beef organ formula on Amazon. Same idea, a fraction of the price. Grass-fed and pasture-raised in New Zealand, liver, kidney, heart, and uterus tissue, no fillers. A hundred and twenty capsules, which is a two-month supply, for roughly what I’d spend on a couple of coffees a week.

I did what I do with everything now. I read the one-star reviews first. And because I want to be as honest with you as I wish someone had been with me, I’ll tell you what they said and what turned out to be true.

The honest part, before the good part

This is not a magic pill. I need you to hear that before anything else, because I’m tired of being sold miracles.

When you open the bottle, it smells like beef. Some women keep a mint in the bottle and say it sorts it out. The first couple of weeks, my body was clearly adjusting, and I’ll just say it plainly: stay near a bathroom for a bit. For a few weeks my own body odor was a little off, and then it settled. If I took the second capsule too late in the evening I’d get oddly vivid dreams. I had a stray breakout or two early on.

There was a stretch around week two where I genuinely thought about quitting. I’m glad I didn’t.

And then, quietly, things started to come back

The first thing was the energy, and it came fast, within the first few days. The two o’clock wall just... didn’t show up one afternoon. Then it didn’t show up the next day either. I stopped reaching for the afternoon coffee I’d been living on. Within a week I was falling asleep in minutes instead of lying there for an hour and a half.

But the moment I actually remember, the one that got me, was small. I realized one evening that I’d gotten through an entire day without snapping at my daughter. A whole day. I hadn’t even noticed it happening, which is the whole point. The fog over my words started to lift. I finished a book for the first time in years and had to sit with that for a minute.

A month or two in, the bigger things shifted. My period, the thing I used to dread and rearrange my life around, got lighter and genuinely manageable. The bloating I’d carried for so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t normal, went down. My moods leveled out. And the colors came back, which is the closest I can get to describing it. I started caring about things again. I had opinions about dinner. I texted my friends back the same day.

I feel like me again.

That’s the only way I know how to say it, and it’s the same phrase I kept seeing in those reviews from women who sounded exactly like I used to. Not a shinier, upgraded, better version of me. Just me. The one I’d been missing in the mirror for two years.

I’m not going to pretend it works for everyone

Because it doesn’t, and you deserve the truth. Some women take it and feel nothing. Some get the breakouts and decide it isn’t worth it. Your body is your own, and it might respond differently than mine did.

A few real cautions I’d want a friend to tell me. If you’re on thyroid medication, or you’re on HRT, or you already know your iron runs high, talk to your doctor before you start, because organ meats are potent and can affect all three. If you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, ask your doctor first. I’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice. It’s just what happened to me, and what hundreds of women leaving honest reviews are also describing.

If you recognized yourself in any of this

If you got to the kitchen in your head and remembered standing in a room you couldn’t explain, or the texts you can’t make yourself answer, or the woman you keep looking for and can’t find, then I wrote this for you specifically.

I want you to know two things tonight. You are not crazy, and you are not too young, no matter who told you otherwise. And you do not need anyone’s permission to start feeling like yourself again.

Whatever you decide, please don’t do what I did and lose two years to it first. You’re still in there. I promise.

— with you,
Sophie