When menopause is forced upon you — and all you want is gentleness.
By Claire L.
You didn't get to ease into menopause. It was thrust upon you.
One day you had your cycle, your routine, your body's familiar rhythms.
The next morning, you woke up in recovery with parts of yourself gone.
Your uterus.
Your ovaries.
Sometimes both.
Your body didn't get the luxury of a gradual transition. There was no gentle slide into this new phase of life.
You were pushed off a hormonal cliff and told to figure out how to fly.
The silence around surgical menopause feels like abandonment.
Your surgeon explained the procedure in clinical terms.
They mentioned "what to expect afterward."
Hot flashes, they said. Possible mood changes. Vaginal dryness.
But nobody prepared you for the grief.
The sudden aging that happens not over years, but overnight.
The loss of control over your own body's timeline.
The morning you wake up feeling fundamentally different.
Empty, maybe. Hollow in places that used to feel full.
Or simply not yourself in ways you can't articulate.
And when you try to express this, the world offers its uncomfortable comfort:
"At least it's over now."
"At least you don't have to worry about it anymore."
But nothing feels finished. Everything feels like it's just beginning.
This isn't regular menopause. This is trauma disguised as treatment.
Your skin burns like you've been set on fire from the inside.
Your nights shatter into fragments of sweat and confusion.
Your breasts feel swollen, tender, foreign — like they belong to someone else's body.
Your emotions swing between numbness and overwhelming intensity.
You crave comfort but can't bear to be touched.
You want to feel normal but don't remember what normal used to feel like.
There's no gentle timeline for healing from surgical menopause.
No roadmap for finding yourself again when part of you was removed.
Just this quiet trauma that medical professionals call "recovery" and the rest of the world pretends doesn't exist.
At Ceceloom, we understand that care must go beyond the medical.
We're not here to undo what was done to your body.
We're not here to promise you'll "bounce back" to who you were before.
We're here to honor the woman you are right now. Today. In this changed body that's doing its best to heal.
That means no pressure to feel grateful when you don't.
No timeline for when you should "feel better."
No expectations about who you should become.
Just breathable softness for skin that feels too sensitive for the world.
Just gentle support for breasts that ache in ways you never experienced before.
Just tenderness for a body that's been through something profound and needs time to remember what comfort feels like.
Because if your body has survived something this dramatic, the absolute least she deserves is clothing that feels like a gentle embrace instead of another medical procedure.
Your healing doesn't have to look like anyone else's.
Your new normal doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you.
And your comfort? That's not negotiable.
Claire L.
Surgical menopause chose me. But how I heal is still my choice.
