Coming Back to Myself: My Perimenopause Story
Dear Beloved,
I have started this post more times than I can count. Some days it felt too raw to share. Other days I worried it wasn't "wellness" enough, that a woman who teaches nervous system regulation for a living shouldn't admit her own nervous system fell apart. But that's exactly why I'm writing it. If I only ever show you the coherent, grounded, forest-bathed version of myself, I'm not actually helping you — I'm just performing for you. So here is the truer story.
The moment I knew something was wrong
It was November 2025, and I was shopping at the Trader Joe's 45 minutes away in Santa Fe, pushing a cart, when my heart started doing something I had never felt before. It was erratic, skipping, pounding, and then suddenly, my heart rate would drop low and I'd feel like I had left my own body. Not dramatically, not like a movie faint. Just... gone. Floaty. Disconnected from the fluorescent lights and the produce and my own hands. That feeling of being out of body didn't last minutes. It lasted hours, sometimes most of a day. Luckily a retired nurse helped me as I laid on the Trader Joe’s floor, telling her my pertinent health history quickly in case I lost consciousness. I am forever grateful for that angel of a woman who helped me and saw me in distress.
As a cardiac rehab nurse, I know what a slow, irregular heart can mean. I know the algorithms. I know when to go to the ER. So I did the responsible thing, again and again: two weeks on a Holter monitor, an ER visit, an echocardiogram, a cardiology follow-up. And every single time, the answer was the same: everything looks fine.
I cannot tell you how disorienting that is — to feel like your body is betraying you in real, physical, measurable ways, and to be told the measurements look normal. I started to wonder if I was losing my mind. I wasn't imagining the palpitations. I wasn't imagining the hours of feeling unreal. But nothing on paper explained it.
The long unraveling
The arrhythmias were just the beginning. Over the following months, my body kept handing me new, confusing symptoms: debilitating diarrhea, nausea and food aversion that went on for months, clearly tied to a gut-brain axis that had gone haywire, along with crushing anxiety that slowly, quietly began shrinking my world. I stopped leaving the house as much. I became afraid to drive. The woman who used to lead groups into canyons and guide people through the forest was suddenly afraid of her own car.
I had my hormone levels checked three separate times starting in February. I went through extensive medical workups, more than once. The findings were almost anticlimactic: low vitamin D, low progesterone, everything else within normal limits. No smoking gun. No single diagnosis I could hand someone and say, "this explains it." Just a body quietly, systemically shifting under me — perimenopause, doing what perimenopause does, differently and unpredictably in every woman it touches.
I consulted with a dietitian and, with Kevin's support, started a low-FODMAP approach to try to calm my gut. I leaned harder into the tools I already believed in and now needed more than ever: vagus nerve stimulation twice a day, daily earthing, morning sunlight, HeartMath coherent breathing multiple times a day, sometimes back to back to back just to get through an afternoon.
And still, underneath all of it, there was this quiet, terrifying question I couldn't shake: if I'm not doing, not going, not fully functioning the way I always have — then who am I?
When the world outside felt as unstable as the world inside
That year, it wasn't just my body that felt unsafe. It was the season of wildfire smoke settling over the mesa, an uptick in bear activity right on our property and around the area, the heat pressing down on everything. Our daughter had unexpected emergency surgery in April. The access to good medical care was hard to fine and truly scared me. The external world mirrored the internal one — hot, uncertain, and isolating. I couldn't travel. I couldn't fly. My whole world got smaller and smaller, right when I needed spaciousness the most.
I felt like I was letting everyone down — my family, my clients, myself. I couldn't work for months. There is a particular kind of grief in building a business around helping people restore their nervous systems while your own feels like it's off the rails. I felt like an imposter. I kept asking: how can I hold space for anyone else's regulation when I can't find my own?
And there was the weight — fifteen to twenty pounds of visceral fat that showed up and simply would not leave for nearly two years, no matter what I did. I didn't like what I saw in the mirror. That, too, chipped away at my sense of self, my marriage, my friendships. I was a shell moving through my own life just trying to survive each day.
What actually helped
Healing didn't come from one dramatic fix. It came from a slow, layered blend of medicine, nature, sound, and self-compassion — much of it surprising me along the way.
Some of what helped most:
Solfeggio music for anxiety and for the kind of deep rest I couldn't otherwise access
Resting without judgment, letting go of the story that rest had to be earned
Learning to say no when I was depleted, even when it disappointed people
My family stepping up — Kevin and my daughters taking on chores and responsibilities while I recovered
L-theanine, which took the edge off in a gentle, sustainable way
Progesterone and high-dose vitamin D3-K2, which have made a real, tangible difference
And underneath all of it, choosing to love myself through a season where I didn't recognize my own body or moods
Slowly, the perspective shifted. I stopped bracing for a terrifying diagnosis that never came. I let myself accept that I wasn't dying, there wasn't some hidden thing the medical field and I were both missing — my body was moving through perimenopause, and perimenopause can absolutely cause arrhythmias, anxiety, gut chaos, fatigue, and a hollowed-out sense of worth. That reframe didn't fix everything overnight, but it gave me somewhere to stand.
Gratitude
I could not have found my way through this without the people who held me. My sisters, who understood in a way only sisters can, even while each of us moves through this transition so differently. My parents and my mother-in-law, who showed up with patience and love when I needed it most. My friends, who kept checking in even when I disappeared for a while. My nurse practitioner, who took my symptoms seriously and never once made me feel like I was overreacting. My dietitian, who helped me find real relief in my gut and my body when nothing else was working. And of course, Kevin and my daughters, who stepped up at home so I could rest and heal.
I am who I am today because of this circle of people. If you are walking through something hard right now, please let your people in. Healing is not meant to happen alone.
Who I am now
I am so grateful, in a way I don't take for granted, for the days I have energy. For wanting to go for a walk. For wanting to create something. For wanting to engage with the world again instead of hiding from it. Those things are not small to me anymore.
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: you are not alone, and you are not crazy. Perimenopause looks different for every single woman — even my own sister and I are moving through it in completely different ways. There is no one script, no one set of symptoms, no one timeline. If your labs come back "normal" and you still feel like something is wrong, I believe you. I have lived that exact disbelief and confusion, from both sides — as the patient and as the nurse.
Healing, for me, wasn't one modality. It was medicine and meds, nature and nervous system work, sound and self-love, all woven together. It still is. Coherence in Nature — the work I do, the reason Living Resonance exists — isn't something I teach from some untouched place above the struggle. It's something I have had to find my way back to, over and over, in my own body.
If you're in the middle of your own unraveling right now, I see you. You will come back to yourself. It may not look like it did before — mine doesn't — but it will be yours.
With so much tenderness, Kate
