Ellen Wong Hit Perimenopause and Started Having Fun
Photo by Ruth Radelet, courtesy Ellen Wong / Duotone by Hot Flash Magazine
Storyteller, breathwork and entheogenic medicine companion, emerging DJ. Currently in perimenopause.
“The journey of perimenopause is a series of small deaths that usher in a rebirth–a “second spring” according to Traditional Chinese Medicine. And this journey asks us to trust the process, to let go, to die over and over.”
Hot Flash: For our readers, Ellen, are you peri or post?
Ellen Wong: I’m still riding the peri-go-round.
HF: So much of this transition happens in inner terrain I'm still fumbling through, while the tension of how it gets expressed outwardly in my life, alongside the story I've been telling about who I am, sits just underneath. Where has the ground shifted most for you, and where, if anywhere, has something (thankfully) loosened?
EW: I experienced my first discernible hot flash in March 2023 at my mother-in-law’s birthday dinner. I was 46. Looking back now, I probably was already entering perimenopause five years before that when I decided to leave my career in digital marketing. I was going through a next-level burnout that incinerated what I hung my entire identity and value on at the time – my career as an advertising creative.
That moment was my “dark night of the soul.” Leaving a career of 15+ years kickstarted a spiritual healing journey that would take me into breathwork, trauma energetics, and psychedelic facilitation. I did a full 180 degree turn, diverting from a very yang-dominant corporate life and began to rebalance by quietly learning to listen inward.
Now eight years later as I’m approaching 50, I find myself back at the starting line yet again. I’m finally stepping into my artist era, reorienting my life force towards creative writing, podcasting, DJing, and–shocker–day trading. The latter is to allow me the financial freedom to keep pursuing my creative projects.
For the first time in my life, the debilitating imposter syndrome and perfectionism seem less paralyzing. A former client of mine recently described herself as being “fuck deficient.” That feels spot on.
However, I’m now contending with fatigue that emerges unannounced and rolls through me like a fog. And I’m also experiencing bouts of amnesia with words and names that is indescribably frustrating. Case in point, it took me a few minutes racking my brain to remember the word “paralyzing” that I used in the previous paragraph. For someone who is focusing more on creative expression now, this is less than ideal. The flow is just downright elusive some days.
Internally, these shifts have delivered a series of reckonings that have felt jarring, destabilizing, cataclysmic. Real talk, I’ve always struggled with change. But I’m realizing this peri journey has offered me chances to leap into the unknown. To die small deaths. Each one has forced me to confront the same two questions – Who are you, and how do you value yourself now?
HF: You had shared with me that for you and with your girlfriends navigating perimenopause, "everything is happening under the surface unbeknownst to their families and loved ones". What is the thing you are least able to explain to the people who love you?
EW: That I simultaneously hold both pride and fear about the self that is emerging through this period of synthesis and streamlining. Because I know it means I may have to eventually bid farewell to some important people in my life.
I’m sitting with a persistent anticipatory grief, knowing how unpredictable my inner life has become. I wonder if I will maintain my connection to my partner, my closest friends, my community, my work as I ride this rollercoaster. I find my thoughts and feelings about my life evolving too quickly to even track sometimes.
In mid-February, I had decided to completely move away from my healing work. I announced it in a Substack essay and revised my social network profile. I was so certain this was the right decision for me. Then after having a conversation with a friend a month later, I changed my mind and decided to continue, only I decided I would now prioritize my creative projects over my healing work.
I am hyper-aware how flighty and unreliable I may sound. But I’m responding with as much grace as I can muster to the rapid evolution happening within. And I’m bracing myself for whiplash because I think it’s going to continue to be like this for a while. Nothing feels 100% certain anymore.
HF: Perimenopause has a way of burning through the patience one used to have. What have you found yourself now unable, or unwilling, to tolerate?
EW: I’m in the process of shedding the people-pleasing survival strategy that has shackled me for so much of my life. I’m not striving to be palatable or understood anymore. I’ve become allergic to anything performative from anyone, most of all myself. After decades of contorting, my face and body are relaxing into a form that I finally feel safe to exist in, and that also feels most true to me.
I no longer shame my anger. This is a big change for me because expressing anger had always felt unsafe and unkind. I realized that I had been the most unkind to myself in bypassing my anger.
I can no longer tolerate over-giving and over-consideration. It’s not my responsibility to make others feel better. It’s not my responsibility to defuse conflict. It’s not my responsibility to fulfill the needs of others.
As a recovering eldest Asian daughter, my value does not come from caretaking or being of service. And I double-down on this especially as a medicine and breathwork facilitator. In the past, I had experienced burnout from doing too much of the work for my clients, holding too much of the responsibility. I will no longer sacrifice my energy.
I have spent a lifetime worrying that I would be perceived as narcissistic or entitled for sharing my creative work. But now I’m excited and inspired to share my imagination through my writing, podcasting, and DJing. All that self-conscious energy I focused outward is rushing back to me and pouring into these projects. It’s liberating!
HF: What are you finding yourself craving now that you wouldn't have recognized before?
EW: Living in a remote mountain community for the last five years had begun feeling stifling, so my partner and I moved back to Los Angeles last summer where we could be closer to our community of friends. Many of them now live less than 15 minutes away.
Ironically though, I now find myself craving solitude. I just want to lock myself in my studio and disappear for days (or weeks) to write or hone my DJ skills. I feel a growing sense of urgency fueling my devotion to practice, attempting to make up for lost time when I was too scared to create for my own enjoyment.
HF: Your work sits with people in some of the most destabilizing life phases a human can move through. Has that given you any footing when perimenopause showed up in your mind-body, and how has it not?
EW: I had embarked on a death doula training retreat in March 2023–the same week I felt my first hot flash (not a coincidence). In hindsight, that training, along with my psychedelic medicine work (death work in its own right), has been a huge support for the series of small deaths brought about by perimenopause.
During medicine ceremonies, I get to sit with people as I witness their outdated patterns and beliefs dissolve. I support them to feel safe enough to let go and allow the medicine to expand them. That requires trust. Trust in the medicine’s efficacy. Trust in their bodies’ ability to unclench and release. Trust in the Earth to provide the necessary anchoring.
During my death doula training, I learned that those who are actively dying need gentle encouragement to let go, and to be reminded that their bodies already know how to die. That death is a natural occurrence, and not to fear or resist it.
The journey of perimenopause is a series of small deaths that usher in a rebirth–a “second spring” according to Traditional Chinese Medicine. And this journey asks us to trust the process, to let go, to die over and over.
The small deaths through my peri journey have shifted my modus operandi from acceptance to authenticity. From outward-facing validation to inward-gazing contentedness.
Before peri, I didn’t think my joy was enough to offer the world. Instead of making music, I created ad campaigns, enterprise content platforms, branding. Instead of creating dance parties, I created breathwork circles, grief workshops, medicine programs. Instead of writing my fictional YA series, I wrote about political issues, ancestral trauma, generational healing. Instead of podcasting about music and pop culture, I podcasted about grief, death, and alternative healing modalities.
Now, I’m learning to create for me–my pleasure, joy and fulfillment. I’m creating purely to express my life, not to be useful in the traditional sense validated by society. I recognize my utility and resourcefulness is not what makes me valuable as a human. My value is in who I am, what I think and feel, and the honest creative expression of this human life while I’m still here.
I have to thank peri for bringing forth this new awareness and audacity from within.
HF: If you could sit across from your future self in post-menopause, what do you hope to see in her?
EW: I hope to see a woman who is motivated solely by her passion for life, and not by a need to prove her value. A woman who has faced her fear of rejection so often that she no longer holds herself back.
A woman who has made many mistakes publicly and owned her cringe as the vital coloring that makes her humanness unique and interesting.
A woman who knows death intimately as a friend, and who moves through the world recognizing the pricelessness of every minute she has residing in this body on this Earth.
And finally, a woman who is bringing joy to others through music and creative writing, and inspiring those around her to express their own creativity and joy on the dancefloor and through written and spoken word.
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Ellen Wong is second generation Taiwanese immigrant and storyteller of Asian diasporic culture. She is also a breathwork and entheogenic medicine companion focused on supporting Asian women in healing relationships with their ancestral lines. She is reinventing midlife by learning how to DJ. Follow Ellen on IG
Follow Ellen on Instagram, and find her at tripwithellen.com, and on Substack at Trip With Ellen and Third Space Show.