If you open my Spotify on any given day, there’s a 90% chance that the last thing I listened to was an astrology podcast.

I love following the cycles of the moon and seeing how the themes of whatever sign it’s in are playing out in my life.

But I don’t always do this with 100% awareness. In fact, usually I don’t. Usually, life will just be “lifing” and then I’ll look back and realize, WOW, that was totally aligned with this full moon energy …

Which is exactly what happened this month. But more on that in a moment.

The more I’ve been moving through perimenopause, the more I’ve noticed how beautifully the lunar cycles mirror the cyclical process of seeing, shedding and emerging that naturally happens throughout the perimenopause years.

I love astrology and I’m passionate about supporting women through perimenopause. Being in community with other women is also a huge part of what makes my life feel meaningful.

Substack feels like such a beautiful place to bring all of that together. So in this post, I’m experimenting with the idea of creating a monthly space, aligned with the energy of the full moon, for those of us moving through perimenopause to reflect on what’s unfolding in our lives together.

We’ll see how it feels, and if there’s energy around this, we’ll make it a regular practice.

The moon as a mirror

The full moon holds a lot of symbolism for this time of life.

Illumination

Just like the full moon illuminates the darkness making it possible to see what we couldn’t see before, perimenopause shines a light on any illusions we’ve been living inside of.

For many of us, the peri years bring the desires and truths we’ve pushed aside for decades into the light, making them impossible to ignore. Whether that’s a job that’s sucking our soul, a relationship that’s slowly dying, roles we’ve played that no longer fit, anger we’ve swallowed… or something else. There are so many ways it can look.

Full Expression

The full moon doesn’t hold back. It shines bright for everyone to see and it takes up space unapologetically.

Similarly, as we make our way through perimenopause we’re called to express the parts of ourselves we’ve kept hidden for years. To speak our truth, unleash our wildness and experiment with new ways of being and expressing that have been waiting to come out and play.

We’re done diminishing our light to make others more comfortable.

Release

Whether we’re ready for it or not, perimenopause arrives and asks us to look at everything we’ve collected throughout our life, from the physical stuff to the emotional baggage, and decide what we want to take with us into the next chapter. Everything else has to go.

The interesting thing is that this doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in cycles, just like the moon. As soon as the moon becomes full, it immediately begins to wane, emptying itself of light and moving toward the darkness of the new moon. Then it begins to grow again, eventually bringing something new into the light.

My experience of perimenopause has been a lot like this. Just when I thought I had released or transformed something, I’d see something else I hadn’t been ready to see before and another piece would be ready to shed. It’s a process that happens again and again, each cycle revealing another layer and making room for more of who we’re becoming.

Thanks for being here! Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

Subscribe now

September’s full moon in Aries - a reclamation of “self”

Each full moon comes with its own “flavor” if you will, depending on the sign it’s in. This month’s full moon on September 26th is in the sign of Aries (which just so happens to be my rising sign!). Aries is “me” energy. It’s about the self, identity and who we’re becoming. It has brave, initiatory energy that’s not afraid to set boundaries and ask for what it needs.

What’s interesting about this full moon is that it sits opposite the sun in Libra, which is a sign about relationship, harmony and balance. Libra is “we” energy.

At first glance, these two signs might seem opposite, and in a sense they are. But when we look at them together, we’re brought to some very important questions that many of us perimenopausal women are already asking ourselves:

This full moon is lighting up parts of ourselves that have been buried beneath the roles we’ve learned to play, some of them so deeply ingrained that we’ve mistaken them for who we are. As those parts begin to wake up, we can start to see what’s actually ours and what we’ve taken on in order to belong or keep the peace.

What’s been alive for me this month

Ok so … WOW! As I look back over the past month, the themes of this Aries full moon opposite the sun in Libra are so aligned with what I’ve been going through it’s kind of wild.

At the beginning of this moon cycle, my relationship with my mom blew up. I’ve spent my entire life trying to find the right words and the right approach to make her happy, while abandoning myself in the process. Since I was a child, I’ve felt responsible for her happiness and fallen into a pattern of suppressing my needs, swallowing my frustration and resentment, and giving away so much of my energy that I would need hours … sometimes weeks … to recover afterward.

About a month ago, I finally hit my limit. I set a boundary and, for once, I chose not to abandon myself to keep the peace. As you can imagine, it didn’t go well.

She told me I was selfish, or in her words, “you never learned how to help people because you’re an only child.” She hasn’t talked to me since.

After a lifetime of bending over backwards to help her, being told I’m not a helpful person for finally having needs of my own was really painful. But it also brought me face to face with one of the biggest lessons I’ve been learning throughout perimenopause, which is that someone else’s perception of me doesn’t have to become my truth.

I know how much I care and how much I’ve given. And I know I’m an empathetic person who’s shown up for the people I love over and over again, especially my mom. It’s liberating to let my truth be enough, even if she has a different story.

But in the aftermath of setting the boundary, I got sucked into my very familiar pattern of trying to make sense of it in my head. Reading books, listening to podcasts, going to therapy, wanting to understand what happened and what I could have done differently. I’ve been carrying the emotional burden of this relationship my entire life. Always trying to make things better and create the connection I long for.

The problem is, this pattern comes at a cost. I’ve spent endless amounts of energy trying to analyze and make sense of something that will never make sense. And this time, my body made it very clear that I’d gone too far. After my back went into spasms, I realized I had to stop. If it didn’t make sense after 43 years, I needed to accept that it probably never would.

So with the encouragement of my husband (and many of you, my amazing and supportive Substack community), I decided to take a spontaneous trip to a festival in New Mexico where I spent the next few days dancing under the stars, connecting with friends and taking my mind completely off the situation with my mom.

It was just the medicine my soul needed.

As I stepped out of the churning in my head and got back into my body, surrounded by nature, fresh air, good music and open-hearted people, I started to feel my own energy coming back online.

It was like a flood of life force came rushing through me, and I could feel how much of that energy had been tied up in my relationship with my mom throughout my life. All the energy I’d put into trying to make her happy, understand her and do all the right things in hopes of finally being seen and loved in the way I longed for was suddenly available for something else.

For me. And for all the other beautiful relationships I’m so grateful to have in my life that fill my cup as much as I fill theirs.

Parts of myself that I had buried deep in my subconscious started to come out from the shadows. I felt alive, wild, free and I had this strange desire to be a little bit “bad,” which was unfamiliar and also exciting.

For most of my life, I believed the roles I had learned to play were who I actually was. The good girl, the responsible one, the person who always did what I thought would make the other person happy at the cost of her own needs. I didn’t realize how much of my self-expression had been locked down underneath all of that. And I’m really excited to see what becomes possible in my life, my work, and in my relationships when I bring my energy back home to myself … when I stop trying to prove that I’m a good person by abandoning myself.

Share with us …

This is a community space that I want to open up each month where we can come together to share what’s been emerging in our lives over the current moon cycle.

It’s a space to be witnessed as we share what we’re finally able to see clearly.
To be supported as we shed the parts of our lives and identities that no longer fit.
And to be celebrated as we become more fully ourselves.

The perimenopause years can feel isolating.

So please share your reflections in the comments with us. Every comment helps someone else feel a little bit less alone.

Leave a comment

And if you’ve written about what you’re waking up to during perimenopause on your own Substack, please share that with us too! It’s a gift to be able to hear each other’s stories as we’re coming home to ourselves through this time of life.

Would you be interested in gathering live?

I love connecting here on Substack, but there’s something about being together face to face that can’t be replicated through the comments.

So I’d love to create a space for women going through perimenopause where we can gather each month. Two spaces, actually. One virtually on Zoom and one in my living room in Colorado for those who live locally.

It would be a circle where we can share what’s really going on and receive support around the things perimenopause brings to the surface, from our changing bodies and health to questioning our identities and the relationships we’ve built our lives around.

And then we’d move into a full moon ritual and release ceremony to honor all the shedding this season asks of us. Each month, we’d have a place to let go of what we’re ready to release and make space for what’s ready to emerge.

Would you be interested in being part of something like this? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

Hi !

Welcome to my first Everyday Alchemy post!

This is the first of many posts to come where I’ll be sharing my resources, rituals and recipes, along with the things I personally love and use to feel better and come home to myself during perimenopause.

One of my gifts is finding ways to optimize my life and feel my best. This has served me especially well during perimenopause because, as you probably know if you’re in this season too, feeling a little bit better can be a pretty big deal.

I enjoy experimenting and when I discover something I love, I get really excited to share it. If I can save you some time or introduce you to something you didn’t know you needed, even better.

Today, we’re starting with one of my favorites: the face and body oils I make at home.

If your skin has gotten drier during perimenopause and you’re noticing more fine lines or changes in your skin tone, I think you’re going to love these oils.

And if you simply want a beautiful ritual that helps love on your body instead of being angry for all the ways it might be inconveniencing you right now, I think you’ll love these oils even more.

Slowing down and taking the time to intentionally rub the oil into my skin makes caring for my body feel like a sacred ritual. Especially when I combine the time with looking at myself in the mirror and saying some loving affirmations that honor and express gratitude for this body I have.

And the smell. OMG.

I use a blend of frankincense, ylang-ylang and vanilla that smells absolutely divine. I get compliments on how I smell all the time, especially when I hug someone and they get close enough to really notice it. And because I’m sensitive to synthetic fragrances, I love knowing that the scent comes from natural essential oils.

The other thing I love about making my own oils is how simple it is. Once you have everything on hand, you can make a new bottle in less than 5 minutes.

Plus, you’ll know exactly what’s going on your skin because you’re using clean, high quality ingredients, all for a fraction of what you’d spend buying premade oils at the store.

Ready to make your own? Here’s what I’m sharing:

• My exact face and body oil recipes, with the base oil proportions and number of essential oil drops I use in each bottle

• The skin benefits of each ingredient, along with the energetic qualities I associate with each oil

• How to customize the recipes based on what your skin loves

• Where applying face and body oil fits into your skincare routine, from when to use it to how to layer it with other products

• My solution for letting the oil fully absorb without putting your day on hold or getting oil all over your clothes and house.

• The exact products I use and love so you don’t have to spend time figuring out which versions to buy.

The Oils I love for this ritual

Before we get to the recipes, I want to introduce you to the oils I use and why I chose them.

Rosehip Seed Oil

Renewal • Regeneration • Radiance • Becoming

Rosehip is the star of my face oil. It’s rich in fatty acids and antioxidants that nourish dry skin and support a healthy skin barrier. It can also help soften the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, improve elasticity and even out skin tone, while calming the appearance of redness.

Jojoba Oil

Sacred balance • Harmonizing flow • Gentle resilience • Inner steadiness

Jojoba is light and nourishing, and it’s similar to the natural oils our skin produces. It helps soften the skin without making this already-rich blend feel too heavy, which is one reason I especially like it for the face.

Castor Oil

Grounding • Protective • Rooted • Deep release

Castor oil is one of my favorites for perimenopause skin because it’s super rich and moisturizing, which feels amazing when your skin suddenly seems drier and thinner than it used to.

It’s also packed with fatty acids and antioxidants, including vitamin E, and its high concentration of ricinoleic acid helps reduce inflammation. Plus, it can help soften the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles and improve the look of dark spots and uneven pigmentation.

Apricot Kernel Oil

Heart-softening • Tender radiance • Emotional ease • Receptive grace

Apricot kernel oil helps dry skin feel softer and more supple. I love it in this body oil because its lighter texture balances out the thick castor oil and helps it absorb faster into my skin.

Frankincense Essential Oil

Sacred attunement • Soul clarity • Ancient wisdom • Divine presence

Frankincense feels like a little bit of magic for perimenopause skin. It supports cell regeneration and elasticity while helping calm inflammation and redness. Its antioxidant properties help protect the skin from environmental stress, and it can help skin hold onto moisture while improving uneven tone and texture.

Frankincense has been used in spiritual rituals and ceremonies across cultures for thousands of years. Its deep, earthy scent invites me inward and reminds me to listen more closely to myself. It feels like the perfect oil for this season of renewal and becoming.

Ylang-Ylang Essential Oil

Sensual awakening • Magnetism • Pleasure • Heart desire

Ylang-ylang has a lush floral scent. It helps balance the skin’s natural oil production while soothing inflammation and redness. And it also supports hydration, making it a beautiful addition when perimenopause skin is feeling dry or sensitive.

Energetically, ylang-ylang brings sensuality and pleasure to the ritual. I love its invitation to reconnect with my body and make caring for myself feel like an act of love.

Vanilla Oil

Sweet comfort • Warm abundance • Pleasure • Loving safety

Vanilla is a little different from the other essential oils in this recipe. I use NOW Vanilla Oil Blend, which is vanilla extract already blended with jojoba oil. I’ve tried other forms of vanilla “essential oils” that didn’t mix well with my oils, but this one blends beautifully and gives me the warm vanilla scent I love.

Vanilla brings such a comforting, sensual quality to the ritual. Its sweetness softens the deeper scent of frankincense and blends beautifully with the floral ylang-ylang.

Know a woman who could use a little extra love for the skin she’s in?

Send this post her way.

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Sacred Glow Face Oil Recipe

How to store your oils

Store your finished oils in dark glass bottles somewhere cool and out of direct sunlight. I love keeping mine in a beautiful bottle on my bathroom counter so I remember to use it.

I make mine in small batches that I’ll use within about six months. If an oil starts to smell rancid, it’s time for a fresh batch.

If you have a large bottle of backup oil you plan to use in future recipes, keeping it in the fridge will help it last longer.

Customize your oils

The recipes above are the combinations I love, but part of the fun of making your own oils is discovering what your skin loves.

So feel free to try different combinations of carrier oils as well as different ratios.

For example, if the face oil feels heavier than you’d like, you can reduce the castor oil and increase the jojoba. A blend of 60% rosehip, 30% jojoba and 10% castor will feel lighter while still giving you some of the richness of castor oil.

Try a different essential oil blend

I love my combination of frankincense, ylang-ylang and vanilla, but scent is so personal. Below are some essential oil combinations you could try depending on what smells good to you and how you want your ritual to feel.

Just keep the overall amount of essential oil similar to the recipes above.

Essential oil combinations to try

Choose your blend based on what smells good to you and how you want to feel:

• Ground and Come Back to Yourself | Frankincense + cedarwood + vanilla

• Rest and Soften | Lavender + frankincense + vanilla

• Balance and Renew | Geranium + frankincense + vanilla

• Awaken and Energize | Sweet orange + frankincense + vanilla

• Open and Receive | Rose + sandalwood + vanilla

• Sensual and Alive | Ylang-ylang + sandalwood + sweet orange

How to use your face + body oils

One of the questions that comes up with face and body oils is: When and how am I supposed to use this?

I personally like using my face oil at night so it has time to soak into my skin while I sleep. It’s the last step in my skincare routine, after moisturizer.

For my body oil, there are two ways I like to use it.

✨ Massage the oil into damp skin after a shower, while your skin still has some moisture on it.

✨ Apply your favorite body lotion first and layer the oil on top.

The second option is usually how I do it in dry Colorado because lotion gives my skin the hydration it’s craving, and the oil helps keep all that moisture locked in.

If you find that body oil alone still leaves your skin feeling dry or prickly, try the lotion-first method and see how your skin responds.

While the body oil soaks in

Because the body oil recipe contains quite a bit of castor oil, it can take around 30 minutes to fully soak into my skin.

If I’m doing this after a shower, I usually let that happen while I finish getting ready. I’ll put my hair products in and diffuse my hair. Then I do my face routine and brush my teeth. By the time I’m ready to get dressed, most of the oil has usually soaked in.

But sometimes I’m ready to start working or or do chores around the house before my skin is ready for clothes.

And I have a solution for that.

I bought a beautiful full-length robe with long sleeves and a pair of washable slippers.

The robe covers my oily arms so I can sit at my desk without getting oil on everything. The slippers solve the same problem for my feet so I don’t track oily foot prints all over the floor. I can toss both the slippers and the robe into the washing machine when they need it. Links to both are below in the “Everything I use” section.

I actually love that the oil asks me to give it a little time to soak in. It gives me a reason to slow down and spend a few extra minutes caring for my body.

Everything I use

To save you time having to research which versions of everything in this ritual to buy, I’m linking exactly what I use below.

Some of these are affiliate links. At Alchemy & Ash, I plan to naturally share the things I use and love that have helped me through perimenopause, so I’ve decided to start experimenting with affiliate income to support my work.

I try to buy from small businesses and other retailers before Amazon whenever I can (especially when in comes to oils), but as an Amazon associate I do earn a small amount from qualifying purchases.

Thank you for supporting Alchemy & Ash!

Oils

• Rosehip seed oil

• Jojoba oil

• Castor oil

• Sesame oil

• Apricot oil

• Frankincense essential oil

• Ylang-ylang essential oil

• Vanilla oil in jojoba

Optional essential oils to try

• Sweet orange

• Sandalwood

• Rose

• Geranium

• Lavender

• Cedarwood

Beautiful oil bottles

• 2 oz amber glass bottles with gold cap and dropper (paid link)

• 4 oz amber glass bottles with gold cap and dropper (paid link)

• 2-16 oz amber glass bottles with black lid (no dropper, which can be nice not having to deal with a dropper for body oil)

• Cute round glass bottles with wood lid and dropper

• Stainless steel funnel set

I love beautiful bottles because if I’m going to leave something sitting on my bathroom counter and use it every day, I want it to feel special. All of the bottles above make this very simple homemade recipe feel like something I’d buy from a beautiful skincare brand.

While the oil soaks in

• Long bath robe

• Washable slippers (paid link)

If you could bottle a feeling for yourself right now, what would it be?

More peace? More confidence? More sensuality? More energy? More softness? Something else entirely?

I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

For anyone who pays attention to other people’s subscriber numbers and judges themselves for not doing or being enough because they aren’t growing as fast …

I get it.

I hate falling into the comparison trap. It was the biggest reason I didn’t want to go back to Instagram and Facebook after taking a year off.

As damaging as I know comparison to be … and even though I know that what we see online usually isn’t the whole story … I felt so much more peaceful not being part of those platforms because it was really hard not to compare.

Peace has become increasingly important to me at this stage of my life.

For my entire adult life (and now that I think of it, most of my childhood too) I sacrificed my peace trying to maintain an external appearance of success that I thought would make me more acceptable and loved.

I didn’t realize I was doing this at the time of course, but I can see it now looking back.

I don’t want to live that way anymore.

Comparison made me look at my life through the lens of everything I hadn’t done yet or must have been doing wrong and wondering why I didn’t have more to show for myself.

And those thoughts could steal my peace real fast.

Then I came to Substack.

I connected with some incredible women who started their publications around the same time as me and were writing about perimenopause and midlife reinvention too.

Some of them grew faster than me, and that made me wonder what I was doing wrong. Some of them grew slower than me and that made me feel like I must be doing something right.

And as much as I don’t want to admit it, there I was comparing myself again and it didn’t feel good. So I took a step back to refocus on my WHY for being here in the first place.

I came here because after going through the biggest transformation of my life, I wanted to share my story with others who might be going through a similar experience during their perimenopause years. I wanted to create a space where we could talk about our experiences openly with people who understand.

That matters so much more to me than how quickly the number at the top of my profile page grows.

Which brings me to something I want to share, because you may have noticed that my subscriber numbers recently jumped from 927 to 2.7K+.

It’s not because I found some secret to growth.

It’s because I recently closed down my Kajabi account which had been my online home since 2017. It’s where my entire business lived, including my email list.

I love Substack so much that I’ve decided to go all in here and make this my primary online home. So when I closed my Kajabi account, I decided to bring some of my email list over to Substack with me.

Ok, I’m going on a tangent … if you’re not a Substack user feel free to skip this part

I’ve heard murmuring through Substack about the question of whether or not to bring your list over here, so if you’ve been wondering that same thing I want to share my thought process and what ended up happening when I brought my list over.

I considered both of these things when deciding whether or not to bring my list with me.

I didn’t want to tank my open rates and I didn’t want one of those accounts where the number at the top of the page looks impressive, but there’s crickets in the notes.

But I also spent many years building my list and many of the people on it had been clients and members of my community, and even though I changed business directions, I knew some of them would like to stay part of my world.

When I imported the list, I sent them a welcome email letting them know they made the cut and that they could unsubscribe at the bottom if they didn’t want to receive my emails - no hard feelings, I did completely switch topics from branding to the sacred initiation of perimenopause after all!

A few more people dropped off.

A couple days later, I sent out my next post and waited …

Then the next week, I sent another post and waited …

I expected my open rates to go down after importing a bunch of new subscribers from my previous business, but what surprised me is that my open rates actually went up!

Before the import, my open rates were hovering around 31%. After the import, my next two posts had a 44% and 42% open rate!

I still don’t have a whole lot of data (only 2 emails since the import), but so far, I’m pleasantly surprised!

One last thing I want to highlight is that importing my email list did absolutely nothing for my notes engagement. The people engaging in notes are Substack users, whereas most of the people I imported are not, and they probably don’t even know notes exist because my emails send them straight to my publication.

Notes are important to me because it’s where I connect with the amazing community of midlife women sharing their stories on Substack and it’s what drives most of my new subscriptions. So I make a point to keep showing up and engaging in notes.

Okay, back to comparison…

You won’t be seeing this kind of behind-the-scenes Substack post from me very often. But I wanted to share my experience with importing my list because I hear a lot of conversations about whether or not to do it, and I hope my experience is helpful if you’re currently deciding what to do.

But more importantly, I wanted to tell you the story behind that number.

Because if past me saw someone else’s publication suddenly grow by almost 2,000 people, I’d probably wonder what they figured out that I hadn’t.

And if I was already feeling vulnerable (hello to almost every woman going through perimenopause and midlife!), I might even make their growth mean something about my own worth.

I might not know they’d spent years building a business and an email list somewhere else and that those subscribers had simply moved from one home to another.

I think that’s one of the most dangerous things about comparison. We take the tiny piece of someone else’s story that we can see and compare it to everything we know about our own.

I’ve done that with so much more than subscriber numbers.

I’ve looked at other people’s careers, relationships, bodies and lives and wondered why I wasn’t further along.

And it cost me a lot of peace.

These days, my peace feels too valuable to keep handing it over to someone else’s timeline.

There will always be someone growing faster. Whose life looks more figured out from where I’m standing.

So when I find myself comparing, I try to remember that I don’t know the entire story. And even if I did, I believe we’re each on our own path, having the experiences we’re meant to have that are shaping us into who we’re meant to become. And for each us, that looks different.

What about you?

Where does comparison sneak up on you the most these days?

How has your relationship with comparison changed as you’ve gotten older?

Leave a comment

Next week I’ll be sharing my first Everyday Alchemy post, all about my favorite ritual for dry, perimenopausal skin. Stay tuned!

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

On Monday I turned 43.

And to be honest, I was feeling sad. My relationship with my mom has always been hard, and this recent eclipse portal brought it to a tipping point.

My whole life, I’ve longed to be seen and known by her, and the truth is, that she doesn’t have the capacity to do that for me.

In the last week, I finally let go of trying. And I’ve been processing a lot of grief around that.

But I’m also developing the new ability to give myself what I’ve always wanted from her. It only took me 43 years 🤦‍♀️

So I wrote myself a note … and in the note, I gave myself the gift of being seen …

… of acknowledging what I’ve been through and how I’ve shown up for myself and others through a very difficult few years.

Writing this made me realize that I might not be the only one who needs this.

So if you can relate, I want to invite you to do the same.

Here’s a little journaling prompt to help you get started.

Dear [], I see you.

Then let yourself really look.

What have you made it through?

How have you shown up for yourself when no one else knew how hard it was?

What have you changed, healed, released or finally said no to?

What are you proud of that you rarely give yourself credit for?

What do you see in yourself now that you wish someone else had seen a long time ago?

Who are you becoming after everything you’ve been through?

You don’t have to wait to feel seen by whoever it is you’ve been longing to feel seen by.

I know these wounds can run deep, but we’re in our 30s, 40s or 50s now. It’s time to start giving ourselves the recognition we’ve spent so many years waiting to receive from someone else.

But that doesn’t mean we have to do it all on our own. Sometimes, being deeply seen by another person can help us see ourselves more clearly, too.

I’m pretty damn good at deeply seeing other people. I think it was a natural result of not feeling seen myself.

It’s also a big part of the work I do in my 1:1 Perimenopause Initiation coaching.

If you’re longing for a space where you can feel deeply seen and supported through all that’s unraveling and awakening in you during these perimenopause years, I’d love to work with you.

Sending you big hugs and so much love,
Jessie May

Invitation:

What’s one thing about yourself you want to honor today?

Share it with us in the comments and let us honor you too!

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

When I first started going through perimenopause, I was flailing in a sea of podcasts and audiobooks telling me all the things I should be doing, from hormones and diet to strength training and supplements.

I’m someone who loves to optimize things (any other Virgos out there? hey!), so at first I was all in. But I was also completely overwhelmed. And underneath all the things I was trying to fix, I was falling apart.

I was depressed and anxious. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I wanted, and I definitely didn’t understand what any of that had to do with perimenopause.

There are so many helpful conversations happening about how to care for our changing bodies during these years, and I’m grateful for them. But no amount of protein or strength training is going to solve an existential crisis.

I needed someone to tell me about that part.

About what happens when the life you’ve built starts to feel unfamiliar. When you’re questioning things you used to feel certain about and wondering why, at this point in your life when you thought you’d have everything figured out, you suddenly feel more lost than ever.

Your perimenopause journey might look different than mine, but if you’re falling apart a little (or a lot) right now, I want you to know you’re not the only one.

These are the things I wish someone had told me when I first found myself here.

If you have a friend or family member who needs to hear this, please share it with them!

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1. Perimenopause can start much earlier than you think

I wish I’d known that 39 wasn’t too young to start perimenopause. It wasn’t even on my radar until I found myself in my functional medicine doctor’s office being told I was on the fast track to menopause.

The reality is that perimenopause probably started for me around 37, but it took a couple years for my symptoms to get disruptive enough to do something about.

2. It can change parts of your life you’d never expect

All I knew about menopause was that it was the time when I’d stop getting my period. And all I knew about perimenopause was … well, pretty much nothing.

I had no idea it could change my marriage, my work, my sense of purpose, what I believe, my friendships, how I prioritize my time, what I’m willing to tolerate and even the colors I like and the clothes I want to wear.

3. Losing your drive and direction doesn’t mean something has gone wrong

I’d always been driven. Through my 20s and 30s I built a thriving community for women entrepreneurs in Boulder, Colorado and coached clients all over the world who went on to build 6 and 7 figure brands.

I climbed multiple 14ers throughout Colorado. I did Crossfit. I tracked calories and macros and broke down my goals in journals, apps, spreadsheets and wall calendars.

But during perimenopause I lost all future focus and I didn’t know where I was going in life anymore. The things that used to motivate me didn’t anymore and it took everything I had to just show up for my daily responsibilities.

What I know now is that losing my direction and drive was actually a gift. It was perimenopause inviting me to slow down and pay attention to the inner workings of my body and mind in ways I’d been neglecting for a very long time.

4. You might have no idea who you are anymore

There can be a time during perimenopause when the identities and roles that used to give you purpose no longer fit, but who you’re becoming hasn’t arrived yet.

Your career might come into question, your marriage might end or go through a big upheaval and you’ll ask yourself if you want to keep playing the roles you’ve been playing.

You’ll start looking at your patterns, belief systems, the stories that have been running your life and the rules you’ve been living by and you’ll question if they’re true, where they came from and if you want to keep carrying them with you.

As you uproot everything that’s made you, you, it will feel really uncomfortable.

Sitting in the space between who you were and who you’re becoming might be so unbearable that you want to rush to fix it or fill it with the next thing.

But if you can muster the patience, stay.

Stay in the not-knowing long enough to allow what’s trying to emerge to come through. Something inside you wants to be born and it needs space to find its way to the surface of your life.

5. You won’t be able to tolerate what you used to

During perimenopause it can feel like you’re becoming less capable. But what I’ve found looking back is that I was actually becoming less willing to override myself.

For most of my life I could push past exhaustion when my body was asking me to stop or make “yes” come out of my mouth when everything inside me was signaling “no”. I could take responsibility for other people’s needs and convince myself it was my job to solve their problems.

I got so good at doing these things that I didn’t even recognize I was abandoning myself.

And then, during perimenopause, they started becoming almost impossible to do.

6. Your relationships will have to adjust

When you change during perimenopause, relationships built around the old version of you will eventually need to adjust or fall away.

As you stop playing the role that kept a relationship functioning, conflict will inevitably arise. But don’t take conflict as a sign that something has gone wrong. Your relationship may simply be going through the uncomfortable growing pains it needs to become more aligned.

The relationships where both people are willing to show up and take responsibility for their part can deepen through this process. The ones that can only function as long as you stay who you’ve always been may fall away.

7. Your body will stop letting you push through

For most of my life, I expected my body to keep up with the plans my mind had made. I spent many years being really frustrated, particularly with my excruciating periods and never ending PMS that got in the way of showing up for my business and life.

I felt like my body was against me, and I would push through even when my body was clearly asking me to slow down.

Perimenopause made that impossible.

I don’t know how else to describe it other than my ability to push just up and left.

I had to surrender to what my body was asking, and in that surrender I received a beautiful gift. I learned to listen beneath all the “shoulds” my mind had convinced me I was supposed to follow and start asking, what is my body telling me about how I actually want to live?

8. It will bring up a lot of grief

The perimenopause years can bring up a lot of grief as we let go of who we’ve been and what we thought our lives would look like.

I’ve grieved the door to motherhood closing and the ending of a business that had been such a big part of my purpose. I’ve grieved finally letting go of the hope that I could have the relationship with my mom I’d spent my life trying to create.

And I’ve grieved the years I lost spinning in patterns I can see so clearly now, like second-guessing myself and devaluing my worth.

You can grieve something and still know that you don’t want to carry it with you anymore.

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9. You might feel like hiding

Being social during perimenopause can feel like showing up to a party naked. When the identities and direction you once based your self-worth on start slipping away, it can leave you feeling vulnerable and insecure.

For me, questions like “How’s your business going?” could send me spiraling into shame because I didn’t have answers anymore.

I went from being a confident, social person who posted daily on social media, went live every week in my Facebook group, emailed my list every week, hosted monthly networking events and group coaching calls, to basically dropping off the face of the planet for a year. I didn’t even say goodbye because I was so confused myself by it all that I didn’t know how to explain what was happening to anyone else.

I wish I’d had the capacity to say goodbye to a community that had been by my side for almost two decades, but I didn’t. And I forgive myself for that.

There’s a lot of encouragement these days to let people witness us in process and I believe there’s a time for that. But there can also be something sacred about allowing parts of our becoming to happen privately. To give ourselves the space we need to fall apart without having to make sense of it or explain it to anyone else.

10. You don’t have to immediately turn your unraveling into a reinvention

I alluded to this in #4, but it’s so important, it’s worth mentioning again. There’s so much cultural messaging around midlife women reinventing themselves.

New career! New purpose! New chapter! New body!

But what this messaging usually misses is how important the space between who we were and who we’re becoming (I call it the void) is to living the rest of our life in integrity with what really matters.

I understand the temptation to fill the space (I tried to do it many times before I was ready, and each time it fell flat sending my right back into the void).

True emergence can’t be manufactured. There’s no 3-step plan and you can’t get yourself out of the void by desperately trying to construct what’s next.

For me, emergence began as a tiny spark of inspiration. I held it gently at first and kept living my life and over time the spark grew into a flame.

11. You have to fall apart before you can wake up

Falling apart doesn’t mean you have to blow up your entire life. For some, maybe it will, but for others it will be more subtle, like an internal reorientation that changes the way you show up in the life you already have.

Regardless of exactly what this looks like for you, most of us will receive an invitation to look at our shadows and the parts of our lives that have been running on autopilot.

And with this invitation, we get a choice.

We can look the other way and keep pushing, numbing and filling the space to distract us from facing the uncomfortable truth that’s trying to get our attention …

Or …

we can slow down, get curious and find the courage to sit with our shadows long enough to hear what they want us to know.

Those of us willing to do the latter get the opportunity to put down what was never ours to carry and transform the patterns that have shaped our lives without us even realizing it.

This can feel like we’re falling apart. But sometimes falling apart is what breaks open the cages we’ve been living inside and allows us to finally wake up to ourselves.

Which of these jumped off the page at you?

And if there’s something you’d add to the list, I’d love to hear that too.

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

Back then, I’d heard the word “perimenopause” before, but all I knew was that it was somehow related to menopause. And all I knew about menopause was that it was the time I’d stop getting my period.

I expected that time to be 13 years down the road.

But there I was, 39 years old, sitting in the doctor’s office being told that I was on the fast track to becoming a post menopausal woman.

In that moment, I went from feeling like I had my whole life ahead of me, to feeling like time had run out and I failed.

The physical symptoms were challenging.

My body felt stuck in the worst week of PMS for months on end …

My boobs hurt so bad that taking off my bra was excruciating …

Hot flashes kept me up all night …

Anxiety and restlessness made me want to crawl out of my skin …

I had such bad brain fog that I’d just sit and stare at my computer for hours instead of getting any work done …

I’d forget why I walked into a room or what I wanted to say mid conversation …

And I had extreme emotional sensitivity to things people would do or say that would typically roll right off my shoulder.

These symptoms got in the way of living the achievement-driven entrepreneurial life I created for myself, but what I didn’t see coming were the deeper questions perimenopause would bring to the surface, like “who have I become?” and “Is this even the life I want to be living?”

During the next few years, everything that was unresolved or out of alignment in my life came to the surface to be looked at and sorted through.

My relationship with my mom, my marriage, my work, my goals, my beliefs and the stories I’d been telling myself for decades …

Through a lot of agony and bathroom-floor moments, I untangled myself from lifelong patterns of second guessing, rescuing other people, perfectionism and over achieving.

And I learned a lot. I learned to …

• Trust myself

• Express my voice

• Listen to my body

• Say no

• Give myself what my mother never could

• Set boundaries

• Receive love

• Follow my intuition

• Accept situations for what they are

• Experience more peace and inner okayness

• Feel connected with myself and others

• Let go of controlling, fixing and saving

• Redefine success

• Rest

• Take messy action

• Feed and nourish my changing body

• Sit with questions without forcing answers

During this time, I lost all future focus. My goals fell away and I didn’t know where I was going in life any more. It took everything I had to keep my head above water with day-to-day responsibilities while dealing with my existential crisis that was unfolding behind the scenes.

But eventually, a spark of inspiration started to come through.

As I spoke with more and more women who shared a similar story, I realized I wasn’t the only one whose life was completely turned upside down during the perimenopause years.

And I started to wonder … why were so many of us caught off guard?

Why wasn’t perimenopause talked about more by our doctors, mothers, friends and culture?

I kept thinking about how different those first few years could have been if I’d known that perimenopause was about so much more than hormones and hot flashes. If I’d known that I actually wasn’t dying or losing my mind, but going through a huge initiation that would eventually bring me home to myself.

So I decided I wanted to share my story and create a space where we could talk openly about the parts of this time of life no one prepared us for.

Which naturally led me to Substack.

When I joined Substack, I immediately tried to wrap this space up in a neat little package and tell you exactly what to expect here. I did this twice. TWICE! Both times, I felt a “no” in my body and took the posts down.

Eventually I realized I was repeating an old pattern, I was trying to have everything figured out before giving myself a chance to discover what it wanted to become.

So I took a step back and started paying attention to my inspiration, the “yeses” and “nos” in my body and, especially, my conversations with you in the comments and DMs.

And bit by bit the shape of this space started getting clearer.

I’m giving myself permission to let Alchemy & Ash keep evolving, but for now, these are the conversations I want this space to hold.

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One thing I didn’t mention yet, but if you’ve read some of my other posts you know, is that before this I spent almost 2 decades as a brand strategist for women entrepreneurs.

When perimenopause stripped away that identity, there was a point when I didn’t think I’d ever return to it. But during the time I stopped trying to force what this space would become, my first client on this new path entered my life.

She messaged me and said …

Long story short, when we got on the phone, she asked me to be her Substack writing coach. She said she had a story that she wanted to share too and was inspired by my vulnerability in my posts.

At first I wasn’t sure, I never imagined offering Substack coaching. I’d only been on this platform myself a couple months.

But then I realized, I’ve been coaching people on their writing for 17 years. And I developed an entire body of work around helping my clients find their truth and express it clearly through their websites, social media posts, talks and webinars.

So I sat with the request for a couple days and felt into how it landed in my body … and it was a full body yes! I absolutely adored this woman and loved the idea of helping her get her story out into the world.

Working with her has felt like an answer to a prayer.

In my meditations I’d been asking to be shown the simplest, most joyful and fulfilling path to being of service in my new business (I have a history of waaaay overcomplicating things) and then SHE reached out to ME about something I hadn’t even considered offering.

She showed me how my past experience could be used in this new direction in a way that totally lit me up - supporting midlife women in getting their voices into the world … in sharing their stories as a way to process and heal from their experiences while helping us all feel a little less alone.

So that’s why under the Creative Reinvention list above, you see “turning our lived experiences into a meaningful Substack publication” and “creating brands and businesses that express who we’re becoming.”

Because purpose becomes increasingly important as we go through our perimenopause years. For many women, myself included, part of that is feeling called to take what we’ve lived through and use it in a way that helps others.

And it just so happens that the work I did for 17 years gave me a lot of experience helping women find their voice and bring more of who they are into their work.

But I want to swing back around to the beginning of this post and remind you that you don’t have to be ready to create what’s next to belong here. Alchemy & Ash is for the unraveling and the not knowing too.

The branding and Substack conversations are simply one part of Creative Reinvention, for those of us who are starting to come out the other side and feel the spark to create again. Wherever you are in this process, I want us to be able to talk about all of it here.

The experiences and identities I bring to our conversations

Our experiences and identities influence the way we see the world, so I want to share a little bit more about what I bring to this space so you can decide if being connected with me resonates with you.

I’m an only child and childfree by choice (although trusting that choice took me a very long time).

I’ve been married to a wonderful man for 16 years, together for 19 years. Our relationship hasn’t always been easy, especially over the past few years. We’ve both shown up and worked really hard to change patterns and improve our marriage.

My relationship with my mom has been the greatest challenge and greatest teacher of my life. It’s a topic that still carries a lot of grief and anger and it’s something I feel called to explore more here, but I’m also grappling with how to do that in the best way.

I know what it’s like to love people who are neurodivergent, as well as people with addictive and narcissistic patterns, and what it takes to begin untangling yourself from the roles you learned to play in those relationships.

In addition to being in perimenopause, I live in a body with a complicated collection of conditions, including lipedema, hypermobile EDS, MCAS and endometriosis.

I’m fascinated by psychology and the human experience. I can lose myself in conversations for hours about why we are the way we are and how our pasts shape who we are today. Internal Family Systems especially resonates with me and has helped me understand my own patterns with more curiosity and compassion.

Open my Spotify and there’s a good chance you’ll find me listening to a podcast about astrology.

In case you’re curious, I’m a Virgo sun, Gemini moon and Aries rising. And in Human Design, I’m a 3/5 Emotional Generator.

I’m not religious, but I am spiritual. You better believe that my office is filled with crystals, tarot cards, palo santo, candles and lots of plants!

Plant medicine has been a huge ally on my perimenopause journey, helping me shed old patterns and come home to myself.

I have a campervan that me and my husband designed ourselves and we love taking it off grid to reconnect with ourselves, each other and nature.

All of these things will inevitably find their way into what I write here because they influence how I see the world and the conversations I want us to have.

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Finding my rhythm here

One thing I’m not ready to do is promise you a new post every Tuesday at 7am.

I spent many years building my life around productivity and pushing myself to keep going regardless of what my body was telling me. I don’t want to work that way anymore.

I’m learning that I do my best work when I give myself room to experiment and follow my inspiration rather than deciding ahead of time exactly how everything needs to go.

But that doesn’t mean I want to throw structure out the window.

Over the past few years I’ve learned how to be in flow and embrace my feminine energy, which was a huge shift away from how I’d always shown up in my life and work before. And now I’m ready to bring a little structure back in, without recreating the conditions that burned me out in the first place.

So I’m still finding my rhythm.

I know that I love writing early in the morning when my brain is fresh and ideas flow naturally. And I know that I want to share something new with you every week.

For now, you’ll mostly hear from me through written posts and notes, but I’m also excited to play with podcasts and lives and see what we enjoy together most!

Eventually, I’d love for Alchemy & Ash to have a paid tier too. One where our community and connections can feel a little more intimate. I tried to create a paid tier when I first got here because I thought I was supposed to have one, but nothing I came up with felt quite right. So rather than creating something just to create it, I’m giving it time to show me what it wants to become.

I’m giving myself permission to try things out here. I’m done letting old patterns of perfectionism get in my way, so I’m practicing writing without editing myself, publishing before it’s perfect and taking messy action to discover what resonates the most.

And I’m done thinking I have to have all the answers, too. I don’t. I’ve learned a lot over the past few years about this whole perimenopause experience and I’m still figuring things out as I go. I might say something one day and change my mind the next and I’m giving myself grace with that. Actually, I’m choosing to celebrate that because it’s a reflection of my openness and willingness to grow.

More than anything, I’m really excited to share this space with you and to see what grows from all the conversations we’re going to have here.

OK, so now I’d love to hear from you

Where did you see yourself in this post? And of everything I shared, what are you most excited for us to talk about together?

Leave a comment

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✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Is it the experiences they go through? The relationships in their life?

Or is it the astrology they’re born with, their Human design, or the soul that inhabits their body?

The past few years of my life have been a deep excavation into these questions.

When I was younger, in my 20s and 30s, I had this idea that by the time I reached 40, I’d have the mysteries of my life figured out. Like finally everything about why I am the way I am would finally make sense, tied off with a pretty little bow.

I had no idea what was coming.

No one told me that with perimenopause the questions would just get louder.

That perimenopause isn’t just a physical transition, but it’s an emotional and spiritual one too that brings all our unresolved shit to the surface to be looked at and sorted through.

And OMG have I been looking and sorting. Going into the depths of my psyche through medicine journeys, therapy, group work, solo travel, books and podcasts. I’ve really been digging.

For a while, the digging mostly brought up childhood wounds and stories around my parents, particularly my mom. I’ve been working through resentment, grief, frustration, loneliness and anger. And during this time I’ve been focused on what went wrong, how things weren’t fair and what I absorbed that wasn’t mine. It’s been a lot of untangling to figure out who I really am underneath it all.

And while the dots I’ve connected over the past few years have felt revelatory, bringing me peace and closure around some very hard things, something cracked open for me while I was writing this post that I want to share with you.

At first I thought I was just putting together a timeline of my life, but instead, creating this post uncovered a new layer of healing.

As I was looking through boxes of old family photos, so many memories came rushing back in. What I saw in the photos wasn’t pain, what I saw was a beautiful, free-spirited little girl with parents who loved her.

I had a good cry soaking in all the memories, really seeing and feeling how much my parents cherished me and created beautiful experiences for me.

I saw their humanity and the spark in their eyes when life was fresh and exciting. When they were still dreaming about what was possible and the life they wanted to build together.

For the first time in quite a while, I felt a softening around the memories I’ve been carrying. It’s not that the memories aren’t real, but what I was reminded of while looking at those photos, is that they aren’t the whole picture.

And so, going back to my questions at the beginning, what I believe, is that what makes a person who they are is a dance.

It’s a dance between their essence, spirit, soul, astrology or whatever we want to attribute it to and the experiences and people in their life.

It’s not nature OR nurture. It’s nature AND nurture.

Because a different person could have had the same parents, gone through the same experiences, and come away with a completely different collection of patterns and stories of their own to untangle.

The point of this post isn’t to analyze why I am the way I am (although you’ll see that my Gemini Moon sometimes couldn’t help herself).

It’s simply a timeline of some of the memories that have stayed with me over the past 42 years and contributed to shaping who I am today. And it’s the beginning of seeing them through a softer lens.

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The very beginning

I was born off interstate 76, in the tiny town of Rootstown Ohio, on August 31st, 1983. It’s the kind of town you’d stop over to get gas on a road trip, but not think much of if you were just passing through. I was born at home on my grandma’s living room floor to my 24 year old mom and 26 year old dad who had gotten married (also in my grandma’s living room) a few months prior while my mom was pregnant with me.

My parents were hippies. For my first birthday, my mom made me a cake made out of beans and tofu frosting, decorated with grapes and raisins. YUM! LOL. My Ohio relatives thought we were weirdos.

For the first few years of my life, we lived at my grandma’s house.

I remember making lots of friends in the neighborhood. Those were the days when you’d show up at your friend’s door and ask “can so-and-so come out and play?”

I remember one day, me and my friends were visiting a neighbor lady who was handing out candy. She handed candy to all of my friends, and I turned around and ran home crying because I knew I wasn’t allowed to have any.

I was a fiery kid.

Which makes sense because beside being a Virgo Sun I have a bazillion fire signs in my chart. I threw tantrums a lot.

One day when my dad was driving me to preschool, I somehow escaped the car at a stop sign and started running down the street. He got out to chase after me and got the cops called on him because someone thought he was trying to kidnap me.

Another day when I was playing at a friend’s house, my mom was late to pick me up. I remember feeling terrified that she’d gotten abducted in a mall parking lot. I was literally sick over it. I imagined her being shoved into the trunk of a car and driven away into the woods where bad people were doing terrible things to her.

Well, none of that actually happened and she finally did come to pick me up, she was just late, which I would come to realize later in life was just how she rolled.

But looking back, I can’t help but think - why would a 5 year old even have that kind of thing in her head? After hours of excavating my deepest darkest shadows as an adult and turning over every rock of my childhood experience, I finally figured it out, but I’m going to save that story for a different post.

The first move

When I was 6 years old, my parents packed up our brown Ford pickup truck and moved us to Chestnut Ridge, New York where I started kindergarten at Green Meadow Waldorf School and my dad started teacher training to become a Waldorf teacher (which he never became, but I know the philosophy resonated deeply with him because he still references Rudolf Steiner to this day).

We lived in a Waldorf community called Threefold, that included the school, a teacher training institute, a home for the elderly, a local co-op, a farm, and many Waldorf-inspired homes, one of which we ended up living in for the next 4 years.

My childhood in New York was magical. Full of connection with nature, art, music, theater, seasonal fairs and festivals and a close circle of friends that felt like family.

I’m an only child, and when I wasn’t on play dates with friends, I would spend hours in the woods in our backyard, acting out solo performances for the fairies and gnomes.

But I always, always, longed for a brother or sister.

It was my biggest wish of all wishes and I would ask my mom and dad every day when I would get one. When I got older (after a brother or sister never came) I remember crying during movies with sibling story lines, always feeling an empty place in my heart where I wished a sibling would be.

A few more memories I have of that time …

The food

I’m realizing that I have a lot of food memories from my early childhood days. Ha!

My parents followed the macrobiotic diet and I remember sitting down to plates of steamed kale, acorn squash and quinoa (that we pronounced “quin-oah” until I discovered later in life that it’s actually pronounced “keen-wa”).

Although I’m grateful for the healthy food I was given, these meals were really hard for me to stomach as a little kid. I loved eating dinner at my friend’s houses because they would have “normal” food like macaroni casserole.

Becoming the responsible one

When I was in second grade, my mom went back to Ohio to live with my grandma for a few months … or was it years? I can’t remember how long it actually was. I just remember that she was struggling with her mental health and unresolved trauma that I didn’t find out about until she dropped me off at my college dorm 10 years later. During that time, it was just me and my dad.

My dad worked on the maintenance crew in our Waldorf neighborhood. I loved waking up early on snowy mornings with him to plough the streets. When we were out, we’d stop at the maple trees to collect sap from the buckets we set up weeks earlier. When we got home, we’d boil it down into the most delicious homemade maple syrup.

One day, my dad got really sick. He was so sick, he told me he needed to go to the emergency room. I was 8. But I figured it out. I called his friend and asked if he could come take my dad to the hospital.

My dad ended up being ok, but that’s just one small way that I became a responsible little kid.

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

As a little Virgo child, I didn’t like how messy our house was. I remember one day, inviting my friends over to play and standing in our kitchen, my face flushed with embarrassment at how the sink and countertops were piled high with dirty dishes.

Once I got old enough to stay home alone, I’d surprise my parents upon their return with a sparkling deep-cleaned kitchen I spent hours on. It felt so satisfying to my little Virgo soul and I felt like such a good daughter to be able to give this gift to my parents.

Yes, I became the ultimate good girl. But we’ll get to more about that in a moment.

The big move

When I was 9 years old my parents told me we were moving to Eugene, Oregon. So once again we packed up our brown Ford pickup truck and drove across the country. My parents didn’t have jobs set up or even a house for that matter, so we stayed in a tent in a campground for the first few weeks while they figured things out.

I was not happy. Not because of the tent. But because if you know anything about Waldorf school, you know that kids stay with the same class and teacher from 1st through 8th grade. My class had become like family to me and being stripped away from them was the hardest thing ever.

I started at a new Waldorf School in Eugene, but the school was a hot mess compared to the school I went to in New York. I was miserable. I desperately wanted to go back to New York and spent months planning my escape. Even if it meant running away and living with my friends. I was willing.

Eventually I did return. And it was great that I did because I realized life had moved on without me, and I didn’t really feel at home there anymore. It was sad. But it also freed me from the pain of my memories and allowed me to find happiness and be present in my life back in Eugene.

I quit going to that hot mess Waldorf school and homeschooled for a year before starting public school in 6th grade.

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Middle and high school

Middle school was when the high-achieving good girl in me really started to shine.

On top of getting straight A’s, I rocked 1st base on the softball team, did my best to play basketball even though I’m only 5’2”, excelled at playing the cello and trumpet with solo performances in front of my band and orchestra, learned piano, competed in dance competitions, performed in theater and starred in a traveling production company.

In high school it continued, although I became more preoccupied with being “cool” so the cello and trumpet had to go, along with theater. But my inner “good girl” still found many outlets to do her thing. I sang in choir, was a peer group leader and sex educator, played volleyball, dated the star of the football team (lovingly called “Beast” by all his friends) and graduated earning my International Baccalaureate Degree.

But grades and extra curriculars aside, my inner good girl really took center stage when it came to the rules I created for myself: No drinking, no drugs, no sex (even though I had 3 different long term boyfriends).

And all for what?

As an adult through many years of therapy, I often asked, why? Why did I always feel the need to be so perfect and accomplished? To be so “good”? To always be responsible and do everything right?

Why didn’t I rebel like most teenagers do?

It’s not like I had super strict parents who pushed me to do more.

But for some reason, I set high standards and never questioned them. That is, until I was in my late 30s and I started questioning my entire life (but more on those discoveries another time because I did eventually figure out why - luckily we have lots of time and space on Substack to get to know each other!).

Oh, there’s one really big thing that I forgot to mention

My family didn’t have a lot of money. My dad was a carpenter and my mom cleaned houses for a living. And I was able to participate in all of the extra curriculars I did through scholarships and good old fashioned elbow grease from my parents (thank you mom and dad!).

We lived on the poor side of town across the railroad tracks, but I went to school with all the wealthy kids in the hills on the rich side of town. And I carried a lot of shame about that growing up.

Like literal nightmares about being “found out” kinda shame.

I remember dating a boy in 7th and 8th grade whose dad was a doctor and they lived in a fancy house on top of the hill across town. I dated him for two years. Two years!!! And I never let him see where I lived.

One night, I was watching a movie with him in his home theater and afterward, his mom offered to drive me home. All the blood left my face and my hands went cold. I panicked and thought of an excuse as fast as I could - that my mom was already doing errands nearby and needed to pick me up or something like that. Whatever I said, somehow I managed to get myself out of that situation.

I learned to hide the shameful parts of myself really young. I became responsible and put together making sure everything looked perfect on the outside so people would think I was cool and … I don’t know … worthy. That’s it. WORTHY.

Carrying my mom’s pain

When I was in 11th grade, I decided I wanted to go to college to become a therapist. Partly because I'd always been fascinated by why people are the way they are, but mostly because I wanted to help people live lives they felt good about.

My entire childhood I carried the weight of my mom’s regrets, unhealed trauma and cognitive differences, without even knowing that’s what I was carrying at the time.

Throughout childhood and most of my adult life (until literally last November 2025 when I went through a spiritual awakening and release) I made it my responsibility to make her happy. It never worked and I always felt like a failure.

I’m not going to get into all of those details here because I’m still figuring out how to share this part.

Let’s just say that my 20’s, 30’s and first couple years of my 40s were an unconscious reaction to “trying not to become my mom” while also trying to save her.

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Leaving home

I moved to Boulder Colorado when I was 18 years old to study psychology at Naropa University - a Buddhist-inspired liberal arts school that integrated meditation and eastern philosophy into their education.

While I loved my education at Naropa, by the time I graduated, I didn’t want to be a therapist any more.

I didn’t want to wallow with people in their pain (no shade to therapy, I’ve literally done years of it myself and have gained a lot!). I wanted to help them achieve their goals and live lives they wouldn’t regret on their death beds.

That’s when I discovered this thing called life coaching. And I felt like I’d found the missing piece! I immediately enrolled in The Coaches Training Institute, got certified and started my business at 24 years old.

Business, marriage and the motherhood decision

For the next 15 years my business became my life. My purpose and identity were completely wrapped up in it, and not in a healthy way. You can read more about that story here and what happened to my identity when I finally let my business go in 2025.

After college I met my husband and spent at least 10 years agonizing over the decision whether or not to have kids. I say “agonizing” because it literally felt like agony.

I had so many fears and complicated feelings around the idea of becoming a mom. I couldn’t find clarity or peace or enjoy my life in the present moment for a very long time because the motherhood question was always looming over me.

When I was 39, I decided that it was time to get off the fence and finally decide, and that’s when I found out it was too late. You can read more about that story here and here, and how it sent me into the darkest void of my life that I’m just coming out of now at almost 43 years old.

So … that’s my life up to this point.

The long, yet oh so condensed version of who I am and where I’ve been.

As I’m writing this, I notice so many little pieces and stories that still want to come out, like …

how my marriage has been one of the greatest teachers of my life (and how did I marry someone who triggered the exact patterns I have with my mom and not realize it for the first 15 years!?) and …

how I, the ultimate Good Girl, found psychedelics when I was 39 and they changed my life (and no, they are not just for bad girls like I was trained to believe in the 90s, LOL), and …

how I developed a chronic pattern of second-guessing everything I say and do, how I finally figured out where it came from at 42 years old and what I’ve been doing to unwind it so I show up in my unfiltered truth, and …

SO MANY MORE.

One thing I know now that I didn’t know when I started writing this post is that our stories keep changing.

We remember new things and see old things differently.

I have a feeling there are still so many layers of my story waiting to unfold and I want to stay curious and open to seeing things in new ways (without abandoning myself in the process of course!) .

I want to share the unfolding with you and all of my stories, lessons and growth in hopes that something I say helps you feel a little less alone in this crazy adventure we call life.

And I’m reminding myself that we have time to go slow and really get to know each other. That’s what Substack is for. So yay!

If you’re new here (or even if you’re not) I’d love to get to know you in the comments.

Invitation to share:

Where are you writing from and what inspired you to start sharing your stories on Substack?

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

We were never meant to walk through perimenopause and midlife alone.

Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

Subscribe now

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I just spent the past few hours, untangling the last 8 years of my business from Kajabi - the platform I used to run everything from my email list to my website, to my checkout pages, my membership and of course, all of my courses.

I’m not sure how I’m feeling right now.

It’s a mix between …

“WOW, you created A LOT”

“You should be proud”

“Look how consistent you were!”

“What amazing value you offered!”

“You really knew your stuff!”

“Look how pretty your hair was”

And …

“Just imagine what you could have created if you actually finished what you started?”

“Gosh, you really over complicated things.”

“Ugh, gag, why did you have to act so rehearsed in your videos?”

“Who would want to watch these?”

“No wonder your business failed, you were so caught up in getting everything perfect that it took you literally YEARS to finish anything.”

Have you ever quit something before it was finished?

Have you ever stayed in a business, a marriage, or something else, long after the voice inside told you it was time to let it go?

Afterall you already invested so much time, money or energy that you couldn’t possibly stop now! Sound familiar?

If you have, or you’re currently in that space, wondering if you can really let the thing go, this post is for you.

And if you have a friend who needs to hear this, please share this post with her. I want as many people as possible to feel less alone as they let go of the thing they thought they couldn’t.

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What I’d like to say to that voice now, the one telling me I failed because I let my business go, is this: I hear you, but it depends on how you look at it.

Was hosting over 700 in-person gatherings in Colorado since 2011 a failure?

Were the beautiful connections and life-long friendships that came from the community I built a failure?

Was helping women with big hearts and big dreams create 7-figure brands a failure?

Was supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs in getting to the truth of who they were so they could express that clearly and connect with the people they were meant to serve a failure?

I spent 17 years … 17 years!!! Dedicated to my business. It was my whole life. And I was really, really good at it.

Until perimenopause arrived, catching me completely by surprise and unraveling everything I knew about myself, my work and my life.

At first the symptoms showed up in my business as burn out. The hours and energy I was putting into my done-for-you branding projects with one-on-one clients just wasn’t sustainable.

Sure, I was selling 5-figure packages with the whole shebang - branding, website, copy, coaching, etc. but by the time the project was done, and I paid my team and I clocked all my hours, the time for money exchange just didn’t make sense. I literally had no time for my personal life because I gave all my free time to helping my clients bring their visions to life.

And they had AMAZING visions! I was deeply honored to help them bring their visions to life. When we finished, their brands and websites were out of this world BEAUTIFUL.

Not only that, but the vision we created was built on a deep clarifying process that connected my clients with their truest, most magnetic voice so they could grow businesses that felt deeply aligned and fulfilling. My process was freakin’ awesome and I was proud of the level of detail, depth and quality I brought to my work.

And … I was exhausted.

Thanks for being here! Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

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The beginning of letting go

I remember being on a walk with my husband one day when I shared the truth I didn’t want to see: I couldn’t go on like this. I was proud of what I created. But I was burned out.

We decided that I would step back from the one-on-one client work (my main source of income) and he would support us financially while I reinvisioned how I wanted my business to look.

That was just the beginning.

Over the next three years everything unraveled. My sense of self, my direction in life, what used to bring me purpose … it all slowly came apart. You can read more about that part of my story here and here.

My patterns and conditioning began to surface, requiring my attention to heal and I went deep into a void. During this time I lost all desire to show up for my business the way I used to.

But nonetheless, I hung on for dear life, because shutting my business down completely after 17 years would have led to a full blown identity crisis.

So instead, I decided to change my business model to something I hoped would be more sustainable.

I’d always loved archetypes and had used them as a tool in branding with my clients for many years. But now, I decided I wanted to create an entire body of work out of them that would allow my business to scale.

So over this time I pulled back from content creation and client work, and together with my amazing team, I worked on creating my branding with archetypes system. Complete with 12 comprehensive Canva brand bundles that included everything someone would need to build a beautiful and professional-looking brand, based on their archetype.

This project took me 3 years to complete. And that was just finishing the brand bundles. That didn’t even include creating the trainings that needed to go with the brand bundles so people would know how to use them and the 12 email funnels that needed to go with the quiz, and the sales pages for each brand bundle, and … 😅

It was a lot.

Ignoring my inner voice

Throughout this time, I remember a little voice in my head would sometimes whisper, “what if we just stopped?” “Do we really have to keep doing this?”

And another little voice would chime in “I want to use my healing to support women in a different capacity … beyond branding and logos … the deep inner work… can we do that instead?”

And the controlling part of me that was running the show would say “shhhhhh! Stop talking. We can’t give up now. Do you even know how many hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars we’ve already invested into this project?”

Not only had I spent the last 3 years creating my branding with archetypes system, but I also spent the last year paying a copywriter, brand photographer and website designer for a complete rebrand.

So I pushed through.

And at the end of 2024 everything was ready to launch. I sent an email announcing my new direction, and then … everything inside me said “nope”.

The final surrender

I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do with that message after investing so much into what I thought my purpose would be in this next chapter.

I reached out to a past client who is a psychic for some advice. She’d become a dear friend so I felt comfortable sharing my predicament with her. She suggested I take two months off to stop forcing clarity and pushing action (very old patterns for me). At first I thought, “Absolutely not. I’ve shown up consistently for my community for 17 years, I can’t just disappear for two months.”

But then… I couldn’t not disappear.

It was like a switch flipped. Something in me just turned off, and I physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually could not make myself engage with my business.

Inspiration, motivation, drive, direction … it all went away.

Two months became three… then six… then a year.

The first couple of months were really dark as my purpose and identity that had been so wrapped up in my business began to crumble.

But as time moved on, 2025 became the most magical year of my life. A year that connected the dots of my life and gave me answers to questions I’d been searching for forever.

I don’t believe I would have found these answers if I didn’t surrender and create the space that life demanded of me, for them to rise to the surface.

There’s so much I want to share with you about that year, and I’ll share it all in future posts.

But for now, here’s where I’m at:

2025 changed me on a cellular level

I shed old stories, identities, patterns and ways of being that had gotten in my way my entire life.

The way I show up now is more rooted in Self energy and less driven by fear. I’m more at peace and more present with myself and others.

I have so much more capacity now for depth, truth, and the full spectrum of human emotions. To hold more of who I am… and more of who you are. I’m so excited to be connecting with you from this place.

And that little voice, the one that whispered, “can we share our journey through the unraveling so others don’t feel so alone?” I held space for that voice throughout 2025.

I didn’t rush to do something about it, but I just held space and noticed that it didn’t go anywhere.

Re-emergence

By early 2026, creative energy and inspiration started to flow back in until it was like a rushing river that I couldn’t ignore.

But the energy wasn’t flowing toward my branding business or the archetype system I created.

It was flowing toward Alchemy & Ash, a name and idea that came to me 13 months earlier and had been patiently waiting for me to be ready.

And now, here I am.

Half way through 2026, sharing my stories on Substack about perimenopause and the identity unraveling and awakening that came with it. I’m passionate about bringing these stories into the light, so you, if you’re experiencing something similar, don’t have to carry what you’re going through in isolation or shame.

What I’m finding through sharing my stories, is that MANY of us are going through something similar.

It feels SO GOOD to be on this path. So aligned with the next evolution of who I was put on this planet to become. And none of it would be possible if I didn’t surrender and let go of my previous business.

The lesson I had to learn the hard way is that sometimes, most of the time, we have to let go FIRST. Before the next thing is clear. That’s the scary part.

But what I’ve discovered is that surrendering into the void, and sitting in the unknown is actually where the magic lives.

When we have the courage to let go, there’s finally a crack for the truth that’s been trying to reach us to get through.

The perimenopause years have a natural way of asking us to evaluate our life and let go of anything that doesn’t align with who we’re becoming in this next chapter.

So now I’m curious...

What are you still holding onto because you’ve already invested so much into it?

Maybe it is a business or career? Or it could even be a relationship, a dream or a version of yourself that no longer makes sense?

I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

Leave a comment

More posts on letting go through the initiation of perimenopause

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

I’m writing from the road and I wanted to try something different for this post. A challenge to myself of sorts.

I want to write without editing myself as I go. I want to write from my heart to yours without a carefully formulated beginning, middle and end, and without checking with ChatGBT to make sure all the dots are connecting inside my post.

What’s inside me these days just desperately wants to FLOW, and yet, I have this editor who’s been there my entire life checking everything I’m about to say or do before it happens and making sure it’s appropriate, polished and perfected first.

I know the editor has been trying to keep me safe, but it also stifles my voice and expression and it makes writing a post take days, maybe weeks. I don’t have time for that on this trip, and honestly, I don’t have time for that in my life anymore.

Nor do I have the desire, because this chapter of my life is about being FULLY expressed.

So, thank you for joining me for this little experiment. I love that this community is a safe place to grow into who we are becoming.

Writing to you from Boise, Idaho

I’m currently sitting in my camper van at a park in Boise, Idaho eating my dinner - gluten free, protein pasta made with lupini beans (have you heard of that?! I just discovered it) and a delicious marinara sauce that my husband made for me to take on my trip.

The drive so far has been very windy. So windy in fact that the highway was shut down yesterday due to extreme blow over risk. So I didn’t make it to my destination last night, which threw off my plan to spend the day working on my Substack and going to the gym here in Boise. Instead, I’ve been driving all day. But I’m finally here now, so all is well.

Except for the vertigo I’m experiencing.

The morning I left on my trip, I woke up with a clogged ear, which is a pretty normal occurrence for me every time the weather gets socked in where I live in Boulder Valley.

It makes me feel disoriented and dizzy but I have this magical little onion trick that I use that usually clears it up: I boil an onion for 10 minutes, slice it in half and hold the open end to my ear. A naturopath I worked with years ago told me about this and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t really know why it works so well to clear up my ear - something about the vapors in the onion seem to magically pull out the clogged feeling and give me my head back.

I only had time to do one round of the onion trick before I left. And it seemed to help. But after driving for 12 hours on the windy highway, gripping the steering wheel as my van swayed back and forth, I now feel like I’m going to fall over every time I try to walk on solid ground. And when I park the van, I still feel it swaying even though it’s not.

The dizziness is really intense when I’m not driving, but it goes away when I’m driving, so at least there’s that. Fingers crossed it clears up soon, because it’s really, really disorienting and I want to ENJOY my trip!

Thanks for being here! Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

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How this trip became a tradition

I’m on the first leg of my annual 3-week road trip from Colorado, to Portland, to San Francisco and back to Colorado. This is the 3rd year now that I’m doing this trip and it’s become a tradition that I look forward to every year.

But it didn’t start out that way.

When I first took this trip 3 years ago, it was because I was struggling in my marriage and I needed to get away to clear my head and gain some perspective on my situation.

That year, I traveled the opposite direction around the map, and when I arrived at my first destination in California and got my campsite set up next to the beautiful lake where I’d spend the next week just BEING, I remember sitting in my van and sobbing. Then I pulled out my journal and wrote and wrote until everything inside of me that needed to come out was on the page.

It was a much needed clearing that allowed me to relax into my time there, which ended up being really healing. I spent my mornings sipping coffee, meditating and doing yoga on the lake shore, and my afternoons napping in the sunshine or paddling on the water.

One day I paddled across the lake to a sage field where I made sage bundles to carry with me on my dashboard. I also made friends with a dragonfly whose wings had gotten wet, and it rode with me all the way back to my campsite while its wings dried.

Once my time at the lake was finished, I made my way to San Francisco to visit a good friend from college, then to southern Oregon to attend a women’s gathering in the woods with 700 beautiful souls, and then up to Portland to visit my dad and my best friend from 6th grade.

That trip filled my cup in so many ways. It gave me back my confidence that had dwindled during the identity unraveling I experienced during my first years of perimenopause by showing me I could travel by myself, and take care of all of the details of being on the road. Things that I would usually default to my husband to handle for me.

It reminded me how much I love, and am loved, by my friends and how grateful I am to have spent years showing up for and nurturing my friendships. And that having a meaningful relationship with my dad as an adult is possible when I take responsibility for my part in it.

It also reminded me of how brave, adventurous and spontaneous I am - to show up to a big 5-day event by myself where I knew NO ONE, that I’d only heard about the week before.

And because the trip filled my cup in so many ways, I decided to do it every year, until of course, I decide not to, because that’s how I live my life these days - by feeling into what feels right and following that.

So that brings me back to where I’m sitting now, in my campervan in Boise, after a long day of driving in the wind. Tomorrow I’ll be headed to Portland to visit my friend, Ashley, and that will officially begin year 3 of my West Coast campervan adventure.

Each year there are new lessons and big magic that unfolds and I can’t wait to see what this year has in store. My intention is to stay open and receive what’s here for me and I’m excited to bring you along for the ride.

I’ll be sharing everyday in my notes and doing my best to squeeze in time for weekly posts on the road (because I WANT to share this adventure with you, not because I think I have to!)

So thank you for being here in the unfolding with me. And thank you again for making this a supportive space to practice new ways of writing and expressing. It feels so good to write from this messy, unedited place and allow my inner editor to take the day off.

And one final thought before I let you go.

This trip is one way that I’ve been able to come home to myself during the past few years of my perimenopause unraveling and reinvention.

I know that everyone doesn’t have the flexibility to just pick up and leave your life back home for 3 weeks, and I also know that there are many paths to coming home to ourselves.

What helps you come back to yourself? What fills your cup? And is there a way you could make a little more room for that in this season of your life?

We were never meant to walk through perimenopause and midlife alone.

Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

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When I open Instagram, (which honestly isn’t often these days because Substack is winning my heart) I’m flooded with ads about how to optimize my health.

Things like getting enough protein, sleep hygiene, how to stop hot flashes, nervous system regulation, hormones, strength training, Keto …

As someone who suffered debilitating symptoms at the beginning of perimenopause, a lot of this information has been life changing for me. So I’m not bashing it.

I’m grateful that peri/menopause is finally being talked about and we’re getting resources that our mothers never had. Even since I began this journey about 4 years ago, I’ve seen a huge surge in these conversations, which is Ah-MAZING!

Still, I’ve noticed that many women seem exhausted in ways that more strategies to optimize our health can’t fix.

We spend years becoming the person we think we’re supposed to be. The one who holds everything together and makes everything better for everyone else. We push through headaches and answer texts when we’re tired.

But then one day our tolerance for performing starts to fade.

We stop wanting to listen to people talk at us for two straight hours or we find ourselves screaming in the car on our drive home because the resentment we’ve bottled up inside needs somewhere to go.

Lately I keep hearing women say versions of the same sentence.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Our bodies are suddenly unpredictable and don’t respond to diet and exercise the way they used to. And the version of us who could hold everything together for everyone else doesn’t work the same way anymore either.

Most of us have spent decades building toward the career, family and the version of ourselves that looks competent and put together from the outside.

We assume that with all that effort, we’ll eventually arrive at a permanent state of having everything figured out.

Then, finally when we think we’re getting close, everything starts falling apart.

What makes it even worse is thinking that we’re the only one experiencing these things so there must be something wrong with us.

We end up feeling ashamed, so we hold it inside and pretend we’re fine.

Then we turn to a podcast or YouTube or we buy the latest solution from an Instagram ad to try to make ourselves feel better. And maybe these things help to a degree.

But we can’t think our way through identity loss or optimize our way out of grief.

Deep down, I think many of us are aching to feel seen. To know that we’re not the only ones falling apart or starting over. We need each other more than ever during this time of life, but the way most of our lives are set up these days can feel so isolating.

Building community while hiding inside it

As an only child, loneliness has been a big part of my life experience. I think that’s part of the reason I made building community my full time job when I was in my 20s.

In Boulder, Colorado, I ran a business and networking community called The Daring Fempreneur for over a decade. I held events, workshops, coaching containers and spaces designed to invite women entrepreneurs past surface-level conversations. I believed in the power of women gathering and I still do.

But looking back, I can see how hard I was working to manage myself inside those spaces.

While I wanted to feel part of something and longed to be seen and valued for who I was, I also feared that if people really saw how messy I felt inside that they’d leave.

So I created an outer shell that looked very competent and put together. And I put lots of pressure on myself to always have the right answers.

And while there was some truth to those parts of my personality, there was so much more that the young, scared part of me was keeping hidden because she feared being “found out” and abandoned.

That was a really lonely way of being in community.

I knew how to show up and hold a room and I knew how to facilitate conversations, but I didn’t know how to actually be held by community myself. That is, until perimenopause arrived and everything started to unravel. You can read more about that story here.

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The women who stayed

I reached a point where I could no longer maintain the same level of composure as I used to. Perimenopause shook me to my core. I became depressed and constantly on edge. Between my business burning me out and finding out I didn’t have any eggs left and couldn’t become a mom, I lost my sense of purpose and identity.

When I hit a total rock bottom, I decided to explore something that my younger self never would have imagined. I decided to start working with plant medicine in ceremonial women’s circles.

I remember one ceremony in particular.

We were outside under a canopy draped with vines. There were blankets and pillows spread across the floor and candles tucked into glass jars in the grass. I could feel the warmth of the sunshine on my face as I sat there still armored and still trying, on some level, to be okay.

But then the medicine took all of that away. It removed the option to have my walls up and my performance just stopped. I came completely undone.

I remember crying so hard my face hurt. I tried to stop because part of me still believed that if people saw me this way I’d lose their respect along with the careful image I’d spent decades building.

But there was nowhere to hide.

One woman sat beside me rubbing my back. Someone handed me water and another woman tucked a blanket over my legs after the temperature dropped.

Nobody looked uncomfortable or rushed in with advice.

For most of my life, I assumed closeness depended on how useful or composed I was.

But there I was, sitting in a puddle of tears with tissues everywhere and the people around me came even closer.

For the first time, I felt seen without the masks I thought were protecting me and I discovered the depth of connection that was possible without them.

While my healing started in that ceremony, the transformation happened in the ordinary moments of my regular life afterwards. In the ways I started letting people in and in the patterns I could finally see clearly enough to start working on.

Plant medicine became part of my path through this season of life, and it still is. I continue to work in ceremonial spaces because of how much they’ve changed the way I relate to other people and to the parts of myself I spent years trying to hide and control.

But when I think about that particular ceremony now, what stays with me most is the experience of falling apart in front of other women and discovering nobody turned away.

I think a lot of us fear that if people saw the full extent of our grief, shame, or whatever we’re most afraid will be judged, that they’d leave.

Instead, I found myself surrounded by women who stayed.

The spaces I want to create now

As I’m stepping back into creating community, this time for women in perimenopause and midlife, I want to do it differently this time.

And to be honest, one of my fears is slipping back into old patterns that I’ve worked so hard to heal.

But now, instead of letting those parts run the show, I have more awareness and tools to bring myself home faster.

I’ve lost interest in being the woman at the front of the room who has everything figured out. I’ve done that and it’s incredibly lonely to be surrounded by people and still somehow separate from them.

I don’t have a finished version of myself to offer. What I have is a commitment to creating spaces where that’s not required of any of us.

I still care about my health. I want good sleep and balanced hormones. A lot of the advice I’ve implemented has made it possible for me to function in my day-to-day life again and I’m very grateful for that.

And I’ve come to believe that advice gets us only so far.

Because when I think about everything that’s helped me through perimenopause, what stands out is a room full of women who stayed when my mask came off.

That’s why I’m creating Alchemy & Ash. A place where you can put down the performance and experience what it’s like when no one turns away.

Invitation to share:

Have you ever had an experience where you let your guard down and people came closer instead of pulling away?

Leave a comment

“You’re Jessie May!” she said.

“Yeah,” I said smiling. “How do we know each other?

“We don’t. But I used to come to your events.” She paused. “I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the way you always showed up so real and vulnerable.”

I stood there for a second. Because she didn’t even know how much I needed to hear that.

Since I started my first business in 2011, I’ve carried a story about myself that I come across as too put together and polished. For years, I told myself that my perfectionism gets in the way of people being able to relate and connect with me.

And to be fair, that story didn’t come from nowhere.

I grew up without very much money. And I was terrified of my friends finding me out. I mean terrified - like, I had literal nightmares about it. So I learned to look the part. I hung out with kids who had more than we did and I made myself look like I belonged. It was a survival mechanism to keep me safe.

On top of that, I took responsibility for other people’s mental health and happiness at a very young age. I was the emotional rock, the one who kept it together so the people around me could be ok. It was a lot of weight to carry into adulthood without realizing I was carrying it.

When I started my first business in 2011, I carried that fear of being “found out” and the need to be seen as “put together” with me into how I showed up for my community. I wanted to be seen as successful and responsible and the one who had all the right answers. I feared that if I didn’t, no one would respect or want to work with me and my business would fail. That I would fail. And I was determined to prove to myself and the world that I would create a different story than the one I’d been handed. But underneath the polished outer layer, my inside world was filled with self doubt and feelings of not enoughness.

Eventually I began to realize that it’s actually through vulnerability that we create connection and trust. This even became the foundational message in my personal branding business that I ran for 10+ years. The more of your truth you can bring into your brand, the more successful your business will be. The more you allow people to see you and know you, the more clients you’ll attract and greater impact you’ll be able to make.

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This made sense to me. I know it’s how I felt about other people and brands. I loved when I saw their messy, vulnerable sides. I felt more connection and more trust, and was more likely to work with them when I did.

And even though I was teaching this, it was a constant edge to show up that way myself. To be seen in my vulnerability was scary and there was still a part of me that believed I’d be rejected if I did.

But they say we teach what we need to learn. And so I gave myself constant opportunities to practice what I needed to learn the most. I challenged myself to share openly, to be vulnerable and to even let people see my messiness sometimes.

And then I closed that business and discovered there was a lot more here for me to unpack.

When perimenopause arrived it brought me face to face with the places that being the “put together perfectionist” were still getting in my way. All the places in my life where I was still holding it together unraveled fast. This was next-level falling apart, and I’m honestly glad that I gave myself the privacy to go through this without feeling like I had to make it relatable in my newsletter or social media.

While I didn’t share the depths of my process publicly, I did share my experience with a women’s medicine circle I was part of that held me and loved me through it. It was the most healing experience because finally, that part of me that still believed that if I really showed up in all of my mess, that I would surely lose connection got proven wrong. I completely fell apart and was loved even more.

And in a different way, Lisa, the woman I met at the conference gave me evidence of that too.

Another reminder that the story I’d been carrying about myself wasn’t the whole picture.

The truth is that there was a part of me that believed I had to hold it all together to be loved and respected. Those were survival strategies that came from my childhood experiences and nervous system trying to protect me the best way it knew how.

But what I’m realizing now is that even when I was still afraid of being fully seen, I was showing up in a way that could be felt. Enough that someone remembered it and came up to me 3 years later to tell me about it.

So instead of being critical of my past self for not being further along, I want to acknowledge her for doing better than I gave her credit for. She was doing better than she realized.

And maybe the gift that this healing journey has given me is the realization that love and connection have been available to me all along.

That we don’t have to be perfect and get everything right to still leave an impression.

And I’ll be honest with you, stepping into Alchemy & Ash is bringing up all of this again, that old fear of being seen before I’m ready and the part of me that still wants to have all the answers before I move forward.

Healing doesn’t mean we never have to look at the thing again. It just means we recognize it faster. And we have more choice about what we do with it.

Invitation to share:

Is there a story you’ve been carrying about yourself that might only be part of the picture?

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

But there’s an elephant in the room that we haven’t talked about yet.

What happens when you’re in the void during the year of the Firehorse?

Because right now the collective energy is moving very fast. And the void asks us to go slow and stay present with what’s unfolding.

The truth is, we can’t ignore the current collective energy we exist in. While we’re each in our own process with our own timing, we’re also part of the whole. And if you’re sensitive like me, there’s no doubt that the energy around us will impact our personal experience of the void.

So let’s get curious about this. How can Fire Horse energy support us through the void and where can it pull us off course? And what does it mean that so many of us are moving through a personal void at the same moment humanity is moving through one collectively.

Thanks for being here! Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

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Fire Horse energy

I’m not an astrologer or an expert in Chinese zodiac. But I am a total astrology geek and spend a lot of my free time reading and learning about it. So here’s what I can share.

Fire Horse energy is bold and free-spirited.

Think momentum, action and breaking from convention. It’s a kind of “leap and the net will appear” vibe. Fire Horse years are known to bring fast change along with collective and personal transformation.

And the reason why this particular year is getting so much attention compared to other Chinese Zodiac years is because the Horse’s fixed element is already fire. So when a Fire year lands on a Horse year, you get double fire energy.

While Fire Horse energy can be catalytic, liberating, and awakening, it also has a shadow side.

The shadow side of Fire Horse energy

In its shadow expression, Fire Horse energy can feel impulsive, impatient, reactive, volatile and exhausting, like everything is moving faster than our nervous systems can actually process.

If we’re experiencing a personal void right now, Fire Horse energy can pull us out of our process before we’re ready. Watching everyone around us pivot, reinvent and create when we don’t have answers yet can make us feel like we should be further along. And it can tempt us to force clarity before what wants to come through has actually landed.

But the void asks us to do something different: to be present with the not knowing. To sit in stillness and listen to what emerges from the space between all the doing.

The question is, how do we honor that during the year of the Fire Horse?

I think the first step is learning to consciously work with this energy, so it supports us through the void, instead of rushing us out of our own timing.

The medicine of Fire Horse energy

If we stay connected to ourselves and create the space to listen instead of react, Fire Horse energy can actually move us through the void faster than we would in another year, with enough momentum that we don’t get lost in it.

This energy is catalytic.

Its gift is that it can accelerate awakening.

When we’re in the year of the Fire Horse, we may see through illusions faster. Whispers that have been trying to get our attention for years may suddenly become impossible to ignore. Misalignments we’ve been tolerating in our relationships, work or health may suddenly feel unbearable.

Places where we’ve been moving through life on autopilot may begin demanding change.

For those of us who’ve spent years stuck in overthinking or waiting for just the right moment, Fire Horse energy can become the thing that finally gets us moving.

A personal void within a collective one

Even though the energy is moving fast around us, you can probably also feel that collectively we’re in an in between space.

The structures and ways of living that once felt solid are changing fast and what’s replacing them isn’t established yet.

The days of performing success and hustling are over. Truths are being revealed that change the way we see the people and the world around us.

We recently entered Uranus in Gemini, a 7 year era that’s bringing huge changes in communication, technology and intelligence. And we’re right at the start of it.

During all of this, we’re going through perimenopause and midlife, which can send us into our own personal void where the person we were starts to change and our new identity hasn’t replaced it yet.

This can feel disorienting. It can be hard to tell if our life is falling apart because of changes happening inside of us or if we’re having a natural response to the world collapsing around us.

I believe it’s both.

And that there’s actually wisdom in the timing.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of us are moving through perimenopause and midlife during a time when humanity itself is going through a massive transition.

Midlife already asks us to loosen our grip on old identities by having us question the roles we’ve performed and the expectations we inherited. It naturally strips away what no longer feels true.

And the world is about to ask that of everyone. Actually, it already is. We’re just doing it first.

So if you’ve been feeling your purpose shifting and the things that used to get you out of bed in the morning just don’t light you up like they used to, it may be that nothing is wrong.

Maybe the parts of us that no longer fit are falling away because we’re being prepared for a new role in the world that’s emerging. And we get there by honoring where we actually are right now.

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Honoring your own timing

Even within the collective energy of the Fire Horse, we’re still moving through this season in our own way and in our own timing.

Some of us are just beginning to wake up to the fact that the person we’ve spent our entire life trying to become no longer fits. Others are deep in the void and can’t see their next step. Some are starting to feel the first glimmers of what’s next. And some are finally clear enough to take aligned action.

None of those places are wrong.

One of the biggest challenges of being in the void during a Fire Horse year is that the speed of the collective energy can make us feel like we should already be further along. The Fire Horse can move us through faster, and that’s a gift. The work is staying connected to ourselves enough that the momentum serves our process rather than hijacking it.

So what does that actually look like?

For me it starts in the morning. Before anyone wakes up and before getting sucked into my phone, to-do lists or other people’s agendas, I go on a walk and then I meditate. This is the most important thing I do to stay connected with myself and not get swept away in the fast paced energy around me.

I go to sound baths when I can. During a sound bath, my nervous system can finally exhale and drop into stillness underneath my thinking mind, where what wants to emerge can come through my body instead of being forced through my head. My friend, Janis, leads a beautiful weekly sound bath in Louisville, Colorado, if you’re local and want to attend with me sometime.

If sound baths aren’t accessible for you, humming, chanting or even lying still and letting music move through you can work. The point is getting out of your head and back into your body, where deeper knowing can come through.

I spend time hiking, paddle boarding or just sitting in nature because mother earth deeply honors her own timing and being with her reminds me that I can too.

Plant medicine became an important part of how I stayed connected with myself through the void. I never thought psilocybin would be something I’d work with, and now I can’t imagine my path without it. It has helped free me from lifelong patterns that kept me spinning in second-guessing and fear. Now I can hear my truth under all the noise and actually trust it.

It took me years to learn, but I listen to my body. For most of my life I overrode what my body was telling me, which led me to burnout and resentment. That’s a story for another day. Now I follow each little yes forward, even when I don’t know where it’s leading. And when my body says no, I stay with that too.

And maybe most importantly, this isn’t a path we’re meant to walk alone.

The void can feel isolating, especially when it seems like everyone else is moving quickly and confidently around you. But healing often happens through co-regulation. Through safe people and honest conversations. For me this has looked like women’s circles where I’m reminded that I’m not the only one experiencing what I’m feeling and that I don’t have to rush to become someone new overnight.

Because the truth is, even in a Fire Horse year, the next version of who we’re becoming can’t be forced through pressure and urgency. It’s something we have to allow space to unfold.

The Fire Horse may accelerate the process.

But the void still needs our presence.

And our timing is still sacred.

Invitation to share:

What's one thing that helps you stay connected to yourself when the energy around you is moving fast?

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

We were never meant to walk through perimenopause and midlife alone.

Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

Subscribe now

For some of us, it’s a relationship that starts feeling forced, a career or business that no longer brings us joy, or children leaving home and taking the identity of motherhood with them. Maybe it’s a body that suddenly feels unfamiliar, the loss of a parent, or a long-held version of success that no longer matters.

Maybe it’s all of these things. At once.

We fall into a place where the life we knew and the person we were starts to unravel. Our sense of identity, along with the things that used to give us purpose and meaning dissolve, and there’s nothing there to fill the space.

Usually when this happens we panic and try to put our life back together again as fast as possible.

Because sitting in the space between who we were and who we’re becoming, between the life we had and the life that hasn’t arrived yet, is really freakin’ uncomfortable. It can feel like something is terribly wrong that needs fixing fast.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone, and this experience actually has a name. It’s called the Void.

The Void may seem dark and empty, like nothing is happening in there. But it’s actually a magical place, full of potential, that’s inviting us to transform.

The question is, will we show up for it?

Will we stay in the void long enough to be transformed?

Or will we try to escape because the discomfort feels unbearable?

Gifts from the void I didn’t ask for

When we get brave enough to stay with ourselves through the void, slowly releasing our grip on the old identities, roles, beliefs and patterns that have been running our lives for decades, the void can offer us many gifts. In fact, it has the potential to completely awaken us so we can be free from the emotional burdens we’ve been carrying our entire lives.

But it’s not easy. Sometimes these old parts of ourselves have to get really loud and really painful to get us to finally see and release them.

I was in the void for at least 3 years. It was set off by burn out from a business I had wrapped my entire identity and self worth in, while at the same time discovering I was deep in perimenopause and couldn’t have children.

For me, the void wasn’t a linear passage with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It came in waves. There were moments when I would start to find my footing again, only for another wave to rise and bring me face to face with something else that needed to be released or transformed. I stayed with myself through this passage, and within it, I experienced many awakenings.

In the void, layer by layer, the things I couldn’t carry with me into my becoming began to fall away, and in the space between, blessings I never expected began to unfold.

What falls away and the gifts that come through will look different for each of us. Bellow is what it looked like for me.

There are so many of us walking through perimenopause alone. If someone you know needs to hear this, please share it with them.

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What fell away for me in the void

Emotional armor

My entire life I had unconsciously protected myself with an invisible shield. It kept me from belonging, always on the outside, looking in, longing to feel deep love and connection with others, but never being able to fully experience it.

Being the “Good Girl”

I developed a pattern early in childhood of feeling like I always had to do and say everything right. As a child I got straight A’s, was in all the advanced classes, excelled in theater, art, music and sports and never rebelled. As an adult, that turned into perfectionism and an inner critic I could never satisfy, no matter how much I tried. The feeling of never being enough followed me everywhere.

Taking responsibility for other people’s problems

Growing up with instability and chaos around me, I learned early that being responsible kept me safe. I took responsibility for everything, even situations and emotions that didn’t belong to me. As time went on, this responsibility became heavier and heavier to carry.

The belief that my worth was tied to what I produce

For most of my life, I was convinced that my worth was measured by what I produce. Whether that be a baby, a business or a certain amount of money. If I didn’t produce these things, I felt like my existence didn’t even matter.

Second guessing

Since the age of seven, I chronically second-guessed everything I said and did. While I may have looked confident on the outside, my inner world was a chaotic swirl of thoughts about whether I’d said the wrong thing, done the wrong thing, been too much or not enough.

Agony over whether or not to become a mother

I spent over a decade spinning on the decision of whether or not to have kids. I wanted to want to be a mom, but deep down, it wasn’t a full body yes. And I resisted that for a very long time. I wondered what was wrong with me or how my life could have purpose if I didn’t become a mom.

Painful patterns in my marriage

It took over a decade of marriage to realize that I had somehow attracted a person who was pressing on every single unhealed place inside me. At first I had no idea that’s what was happening. But in the void, those patterns got so loud and so undeniable that I couldn’t ignore them anymore.

Carrying my mom’s unhealed pain

From an early age, I made it my job to make my mom happy. And I carried that job well into adulthood, getting pulled into cycles of rescuing, then collapsing into guilt and feelings of failure when nothing I tried ever seemed to work.

My business

My business was everything to me: my purpose, my meaning, my sense of identity and self worth. It was also sucking the life out of me and feeding patterns that needed to change. I held on as long as I possibly could. I really didn’t want the void to take this too. But when I finally let go, that’s when some of the biggest magic began to come through.

What I received from the void

The ability to feel my feelings

I had spent my adult and teenage years stuffing my feelings and holding it all together. But in the void, something shifted and the lid I’d kept so tightly screwed on came off. Now I could feel love, connection, grief, peace, rage, frustration, awe, excitement, joy … all of it came flooding in. I started to feel the breadth of my human experience and it felt so good.

Soul-filling friendships

I created life-long friendships within the void. Friendships built on deep honesty. On being seen right inside of my mess. It felt amazing to finally be able to drop the mask of perfection and realize that I could experience love and connection by being my unfiltered, imperfect self.

The ability to hear my body’s messages

Sure, I understood the concept of listening to my body but for years I said yes when I meant no and worked when I needed rest. Now I was developing an embodied awareness that was impossible to ignore. I stopped abandoning myself and started honoring the clear needs my body communicated.

Freedom

One of the greatest gifts I received from the void was freedom. Freedom from my relentless inner critic and from the responsibilities I’d been carrying for decades that were never actually mine. What moved in to fill that space was an inner okayness that wasn’t tied to what I produced, how together I seemed, or whether I could fix what was hurting the people I loved.

A truer marriage

There were moments in the void where I thought it was going to take my marriage too. But I’m grateful that we were both willing to show up, to look at our roles in the painful dynamics we had created over the past 18 years, and to do the work, both individually and together, to create a new path forward.

Peace around not becoming a mom

The question of motherhood that had once taken up so much space no longer ruled my mind. I learned to trust that my life could still be full and meaningful without having children. And I began to feel gratitude for my freedom and for the many ways I am here to love, create and offer value beyond the role of being a mother.

Intuitive awakening

I have always had strong intuition, but years of second-guessing myself had drowned it out. In the void, that changed. I started receiving downloads in my dreams and waking life of very specific names, numbers and symbols that pointed me to answers I’d been searching for my entire life. I finally found peace around the most painful things I’d been carrying for decades.

Alchemy & Ash

Alchemy & Ash was the new form my gifts wanted to take. It came through in whispers at first, and I pushed them away because leaving my prior business that I spent 15 years building wasn’t the logical choice. But eventually, honoring what wanted to come through stopped feeling optional. Letting go to make space for this was one of the most painful things I did in the void. And once I did, everything started falling into alignment in a way that felt almost effortless.

Ability to see magic around me

I used to walk through life too busy to notice what was right in front of me. But now I was waking up. One day I’d been deep in research for the Alchemy & Ash brand, deciding between a butterfly and a dragonfly for the logo. I chose the dragonfly, closed my computer and headed out for a walk. As soon as I stepped outside, there was a dragonfly on the sidewalk in front of me. Before, I would have walked straight past it. But now I knew. The universe was telling me I was on the right path.

Supporting ourselves through the void

For me, supporting myself through the void looked like creating space and allowing for my process. Slow mornings meditating and journaling, walks in nature, road trips in my camper van, deep conversations with soul sisters, sessions with my therapist, and plant medicine journeys where I intentionally worked to unravel old patterns and create new ones.

It also looked like being in community. I don’t think I could have worked through some of the lessons I needed to learn without other people, because so many of those lessons were relational.

I still showed up for my day-to-day life and responsibilities. But I let go of forcing clarity on my next steps or striving toward goals I wasn’t even sure I wanted anymore. I stopped trying to get somewhere and just let myself be in it.

There was a lot of grief. A lot of crying. And a lot of letting go. For me, it was a three year process. For you, it might look completely different, and that’s okay.

What falls away for you, and what comes through, will be specific to your life and your becoming. There’s no template for this and there’s no doing it wrong. So I invite you to release any idea about how long this should take or what it should look like.

What I can tell you is that staying, really staying, with yourself through this passage is one of the most courageous things you’ll ever do. And the woman on the other side is worth every uncomfortable moment it takes to get there.

Invitation to share:

If you’re in the void right now, what’s the hardest part?

And if you’ve been through it, what’s one gift you received that you didn’t expect?

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

At the time, I didn’t have a name for what I was going through, but looking back, I can see that I was clearly in the void that so many women in their perimenopause years experience. It’s that liminal space where who we were has unraveled and who we’re becoming hasn’t taken shape yet.

I wrote that journal entry from my Air Bnb bedroom where I was attending a 3-day retreat weekend to support myself through this painful unraveling.

As I looked up from my journal, a small plant with roots extending into the air, caught my attention. It was the air plant that my husband gave me as a gift before I left for the weekend.

As I sat there having a moment with the sweet little being, I realized something: this plant didn’t need to be rooted in soil to thrive.

What?! How is that even possible? I thought.

Thanks for being here! Subscribe to be part of our community of women waking up in perimenopause and midlife.

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I went on to write …

“What if I could be like the air plant? What if I don’t need to be “rooted”? What if I could thrive without certainty, without knowing who I am, what I want or what I believe?

Have I been striving for the wrong things all along?

I’ve always lived with the idea that to thrive, to be ok, to be a worthy person, I must be grounded, have clear direction and a solid sense of who I am and what I believe. In my mind, there was no other option, that’s just what I should aim for if I want to be someone worth anything.

But where did that idea even come from? Is it just my ego trying to survive?

What if I could be more free, happy and content by not grasping so desperately to a sense of self? What if by being “unrooted” I could actually thrive more because I could be flexible, open and unattached to expectations?

What if my value doesn’t come from being certain, solid and grounded, but from somewhere else entirely?”

I had more questions than I had answers, and for the first time, that felt okay. The questions opened me to something new, something that made it possible to sit in the discomfort of the void and exist without the identities that had always given me comfort.

That morning, after I closed my journal and before I walked downstairs to be with the group, I drew a card: The Bardo. The place between. The card read: “The Bardo suspends us in spaciousness for just long enough to open us to higher wisdom.”

That was me. Suspended in space, and for the first time, not fighting it. I breathed in deep and felt a sense of calm flow through my body.

I opened my journal one last time to write:

“I feel like I’m on the brink of a breakthrough but I have to shed old skin to get there. I cannot stay the same and become who I’m meant to be.”

Letting go can be painful, but it can also open us up to possibilities we couldn’t have seen while still holding on.

If something (or everything) in your life feels like it’s coming apart right now…
If you’re questioning things you used to feel so certain about…

Can you let yourself be there, even just a little longer, without rushing to fix it?

It might just be that nothing needs to be fixed. That the magic unfolding for you in the space between is exactly what’s needed for who you’re becoming.

In my next piece, I’ll share about the magic that unfolded for me when I stayed in the void long enough to discover what wanted to emerge.

Invitation to share:

Did any part of this resonate with you? I’d love to hear what it brought up for you.

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now

For over a decade, the question of motherhood had caused me a lot of emotional turmoil. I wanted to want to be a mom, but something inside me wasn’t a full yes. I had fears and resistances I couldn’t fully explain.

So in a final attempt to make this decision, I enrolled in a course called The Motherhood Clarity Course, led by a therapist who had guided women through this decision for decades. I showed up. I did the journaling prompts and participated in the discussions. I began uncovering the layers of my resistance and learning about my childhood experiences that were making this decision so complicated for me.

But something else was happening underneath all of it that I didn’t have a name for yet.

I started experiencing a flood of strange symptoms:

brain fog so thick I would lose words mid-sentence, walk into rooms and forget why I was there, and sit at my desk staring at nothing.

Anxiety took over my mind and body.

I was snapping at my husband over things that used to roll right off my shoulders.

I was hypersensitive to everything my friends would say or do.

I missed a meeting with the same client three times in a row (Thankfully she gave me grace!).

Then I sunk into the darkest depression of my life.

I felt like I was losing my mind, like the person I had always known myself to be had disappeared, and I didn’t know who was left.

At the same time, my cycle, which had always been regular, was changing. I went to see my doctor and got my bloodwork reviewed. She looked at me and said: “You’re not having kids. You’re in perimenopause, and your FSH levels are postmenopausal.”

I was 39 years old.

In my mind, all I knew about menopause was that it was a far off date when my period would stop coming. That’s about it.

But perimenopause? And all these symptoms that were derailing my life? I had no clue this was coming until it hit me in the face.

In an instant, I went from agonizing over the decision: “do I become a mom or not?“ to having that decision made for me.

Now you might be wondering why this even mattered if I wasn’t sure I wanted to become a mom in the first place. There is SO MUCH to unpack around this, which I’ll share in future posts, but in short, this is why: for over a decade, I had poured everything into my business. I had meshed my entire sense of identity, purpose, and meaning with it. But my business was burning me out.

And when I was told I couldn’t have kids at the same time that my business became unsustainable, I was left without the two paths I had been navigating between. Without the identity I had constructed. Without anywhere to land.

Who was I if I wasn’t a business owner? Who was I if I couldn’t become a mom? What was left?”

The rug of meaning, purpose, self-worth, and value had been pulled out from under my feet, all at once.

The grief became crushing. I felt like time had run out, like I had failed. Like I was just getting started at life, and yet somehow it was already over. I was experiencing debilitating mental and emotional symptoms on top of overwhelming health fears.

My attention shifted from the motherhood decision almost immediately as I threw myself into healing with everything I had. One hundred and fifty percent. I got my hormones in balance. I changed how I moved my body and what I ate. I began looking at my shadows; really looking at the stories and patterns that had been shaping my entire life. I listened to podcasts and read books about the physical shifts that happen during perimenopause, as well as the often overlooked spiritual and identity transformations that happen for so many women during this time.

It was all helpful, but I didn’t expect where my deepest healing would come from: being in connection with other women and non-binary friends.

By sharing my experience with others who truly understood, I got to experience deep love and connection through my falling apart. Not in spite of it.

I didn’t even know that was possible.

My whole life I had held it together, believing I had to be impressive to be accepted and loved. That belief was exhausting and isolating. And in my connection with other women, that belief shattered. I was a mess. I had nothing to offer except my raw, unpolished truth. And I was seen and loved anyway, right inside my unraveling.

That experience changed my life.

I never received a clear, divine message about whether to become a mother. But what I found instead was peace. Inner okayness. Freedom from beliefs and patterns that had ruled my life for decades. Groundedness. Joy and fulfillment that had nothing to do with roles or titles or accomplishments. I learned, in my bones, that being me is enough. That I don’t need to achieve a certain number or have a certain identity to be worthy of love.

Today, I live my life from that place, from the inside out. The work is never done, and honestly, I’ve stopped expecting it to be, because the lessons keep unfolding, and I keep showing up for them.

And through all of it, what grounds me most is being in spaces with other women and non-binary people where I can process (and practice) what’s unfolding out loud. Where I can be seen and heard in the middle of it. Where someone can reflect my light back to me when I can’t quite see it myself. Where we can share what we’re moving through with less shame and loneliness because we’re not the only one.

Share

I share this because I believe this story isn’t just mine.

Maybe you’ve felt your life shift beneath you and wondered who you are without the roles you’ve always played.

Maybe your body is changing and no one around you seems to understand.

Maybe you’ve poured yourself into a business or career that no longer fits, and you’ve been trying to figure out why it doesn’t light you up anymore.

Maybe you’ve sat with a decision so heavy it’s kept you from living fully in the present.

Maybe you’ve felt purposeless or lost and you just don’t know what you want anymore.

Your story doesn’t have to look exactly like mine. But if any part of what I’ve shared has touched something true in you, this is a space where you can be seen and held in your experience.

An online course can give you information and a step-by-step formula can give you structure. And while those can be helpful, what most women in midlife actually need is to be seen and heard by other women who understand what this feels like from the inside. That's what I'm creating here.

I’ll begin by sharing my unfiltered stories about my experience of breaking down and rising more true (I’m so excited to be here!). And soon, I’ll be opening spaces where we can gather in community to hold each other as we bravely walk through perimenopause and midlife together.

If you’re still here reading this, leave me a comment and let me know what resonates most from this post. I want to hear about your experience so I can start to mold this space into something that serves you!

Oh, and a word about belonging.

This space is centered around the perimenopause years, including the time leading into it, moving through it, and beyond it. For most of us, perimenopause happens in our 40s, but for me it started earlier and for some it starts later.

The truth is, age doesn’t matter so much here. What matters is that you’re a woman or non-binary person who is going through deep shifts in your body, identity, relationships and/or career and you want a safe place to be held through it all.

What matters, is that even though you might feel like everything is falling apart, you’re choosing to show up for yourself as you walk through this portal.

If this is you, I’m so excited to walk this path with you!

Invitation to share:

Did any part of this story feel familiar to you?

I’d love to hear what resonated.

Leave a comment

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

Get to know me here

Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

Subscribe to Alchemy & Ash

A space for women unraveling and recreating their lives during the perimenopause years. Pivots, purpose, identity, patterns and turning our experiences into meaningful work … those are just some of the things we explore together here.

Subscribe now