I want to start by being honest about something.
Sex was never something I was comfortable with until my 40s. I was raised in a conservative Catholic environment where sex was something you didn’t talk about, didn’t explore, and definitely didn’t ask questions about. A lot of shame and guilt came baked into the experience long before I had language for my own body. No one taught us about our vaginas, our arousal, or our bodies. Our mothers weren’t taught either. That gap didn’t start with us. It’s generational.
So when things started changing in my late 30s and early 40s, I did what most high-functioning women do: I rationalized a lot because none of it arrived like a clear breaking point.
I told myself I was tired. Overworked. Burnt out. Stressed. Traveling too much. Running too hard. I didn’t wake up one day with symptoms; they crept in slowly enough to feel like “just life.”
Until they didn’t.
Here’s what actually happened.
I started experiencing vaginal dryness; not mild discomfort, but dryness to the point where I thought something was wrong with me. Sex started to feel uncomfortable, then painful. I began questioning myself in ways that quietly broke me:
Am I not attracted enough to my partner?
Am I not turned on enough?
Is this a relationship issue? A me issue?
At the same time, my urinary patterns changed. I used to be able to hold my pee forever. Suddenly I couldn’t. I had urgency. Frequency. I peed on myself more than once because I couldn’t get to the bathroom fast enough. Right before my period, I started getting symptoms that mimicked UTIs, burning, urgency, even when tests came back “normal.”
My desire didn’t just dip. It disappeared.
And that was the most destabilizing part. I’m not someone who has ever been indifferent to desire — for sex, for life, for pursuit. Losing it felt like losing part of my identity. I felt ashamed. Embarrassed. Quietly depressed. I kept thinking: Is this it? Is this just how it goes now?
Medically, I was told I was fine.
More than once.
At one point, I was told to “focus more on foreplay.”
No one examined my vaginal tissue. No one talked to me about estrogen decline. No one mentioned perimenopause. And most physicians aren’t trained to diagnose or treat it, especially when symptoms show up before cycles fully change.
There is one more thing I learned that year, and it turned out not to be about sex at all.
Someone explained to me that the hormones that were declining don’t only run desire for sex. They run desire for anything. Pursuit. Curiosity. The wanting that makes you pick a thing up and chase it.
I had to sit down when I heard that.
Because I had been telling myself a story where my libido had gone quiet and everything else was fine, and it wasn’t true. That same year I stopped starting things. I stopped answering messages. I had ideas and let them sit. I told myself I was tired, or busy, or past the age where you chase things.
It had not occurred to me that those were the same system.
I don’t know what to do with that yet, honestly. I’m not sure whether knowing the mechanism changes anything. But it moved something, because for a couple of years I had been reading my own flatness as burnout or depression. Something I should have been able to push through, the way I have pushed through everything else.
And it turns out I was asking my body for interest it no longer had the chemistry to produce.
I keep thinking about how long I would have gone on blaming myself for that. Years, probably. I had a whole framework ready for it. Discipline. Effort. The belief that anything I wasn’t doing was something I had chosen not to do.
I want to be careful about how I say this next part, because it took me years to see it.
I went into that appointment with a body that had changed. I came out with a suggestion about foreplay.
And I took it. Of course I took it. I had been raised not to ask questions about any of this, so when someone in a white coat implied the problem was my attention, or my effort, or my partner, that fit a story I already believed about myself.
Nobody looked at the tissue. That’s the part I keep returning to. The answer was physical and it was available and nobody looked.
I think about my mother sometimes, who was handed even less than I was and had nobody to ask either. It would be easy to make that a story about her. It isn’t. She was doing what the women before her did, which is not talk about it, and I did the same thing for forty years without ever deciding to.
I don’t know yet how much of that silence belonged to the doctor and how much of it I brought in with me.
Paola
Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.
This reminds me of a book I read last year called “this ends with us.” It showed the hard work we put to break the generational trauma or in this case, silence. If we want daughters to stop measuring their worth based on the outside body, I think having blunt conversations and giving them opportunities for honest questions and discussion of feelings. No shame, no judgment. Setting an example is also impactful, seeing us take care of our bodies from a physiological perspective is encouraging for them to follow suit with confidence. Sometimes, this is easier said than done, breaking patterns is a continuous journey!