My Story
I'm 52. And I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with me for longer than I can remember.
It started years ago. Something was off, but my GP wasn't interested. So I went the naturopath route.
Years of supplements, sleep protocols, recommendations for brain fog, memory issues, anxiety attacks that came out of nowhere, fatigue that got labeled "burnout" or "adrenal fatigue," and weight gain that blew past anything I'd experienced during pregnancy.
Some things worked. For a while. Then they'd stop, for no apparent reason. Every couple of years, we'd circle back to step one and try the same solutions again. Because the system had run out of ideas.
It wasn't until a few years ago that anyone said the word perimenopause out loud to me. Even though that's clearly what I'd been dealing with for ages.
Then my son was diagnosed with ADHD.
Which sent me down a rabbit hole a lot of women in their 40s and 50s will recognize: the search for understanding of my own brain. The realization that my son came by it honestly.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 50. Right when I couldn't keep up anymore.
The masking that had been my superpower, the ability to hold everything in memory, to think through a million variables at once and be three steps ahead of the room, all of that just... stopped. I was suddenly overwhelmed, anxious, paralyzed with indecision. Burned out. Unable to function in my high-powered job.
The things that made me a powerhouse were gone.
ADHD meds were game-changing. They didn't fix perimenopause, but they started to separate the two. The impulsivity, the emotional dysregulation, the overwhelm. Once those were managed, what was left could finally be addressed with HRT.
But here's the thing I kept running into:
I was not a good patient.
Every appointment, I got the same questions:
How have you been feeling?
What about your sleep? Your mood? Your weight?
How is this different from last time?
And even though I expected them, I never had real answers. I could tell you how I felt right now. Maybe the last few days. But the last two months? A fog. It's still a fog.
What was needed were specifics. This went up. This went down. Since this med, since this change, here's what's different.
I couldn't provide that.
And I'm now acutely aware:
ADHD and perimenopause suffer from a lot of the same challenges.
The brain fog. The memory issues. The executive dysfunction. Whether you have ADHD or not, the ability to track effectively, to remember to write things down, to take notes... that's exactly the function that's gone.
It's one thing to tell someone "just keep track of your symptoms."
It's another to build something that actually makes that possible when your brain is working against you.
That's the problem I want to solve.
I want to build tracking that's light enough to use on the hard days. Engaging enough that you actually come back. Smart enough to turn scattered check-ins into something you can hand your doctor and say: "I don't remember the last two months. But here's what happened. Help me."
But I also think there's something bigger here.
Perimenopause is barely studied. Women's health in general is chronically underfunded and dismissed. We all know something is happening to us. We feel it. We live it. And yet the medical system shrugs.
What if we stopped waiting for them to figure it out?
What if we could collect enough data to show what we all know to be true? What if we could make connections that haven't been made before? What if we could be the ones to crack the code?
It's a lofty goal, but it's this idea that gets me up in the morning. That's why I'm building FINE!
Not just to help myself get through the next appointment. But to help all of us stop suffering in silence, start comparing notes, and finally have the data to prove what's been dismissed for too long.
Because we're going to make ourselves fine.