The Rage Is Not a Symptom. The Rage Is Information.

Everyone talks about perimenopausal rage like it’s a malfunction. Like something misfired. Like you’re a car making a noise it shouldn’t be making and the goal is to make it stop.

I’ve started thinking about it differently.

The rage, when I track it, is almost never random. It shows up when I’ve said yes to something I meant to say no to. It shows up at the end of a week where I’ve been everyone’s resource and no one’s been mine. It shows up in response to being talked over, talked around, handed the logistical labor, treated as ambient — as furniture that also runs errands.

The rage knows. It has been keeping a ledger I didn’t know existed, and somewhere around forty-five it decided to start reading it out loud.

That doesn’t mean the delivery is always useful. Rage at 11pm on a Wednesday because someone left a cabinet open is not useful. The cabinet is not the problem. The cabinet is the ledger item that broke the page.

What I’ve found — slowly, imperfectly — is that the rage is most useful when I treat it as a signal rather than an event. Something I track. Something I look at the next morning when I’m not in it and ask: what was actually in the room with me last night?

Usually there’s something worth knowing.

The goal isn’t to eliminate it. The goal is to get better at reading it.