Jackie Carreira is a Suffolk-based writer, musician, and co-founder of QuirkHouse Theatre and regularly hosts events with our local libraries. Her books include The Amber Library & Other Stories, a collection of short stories and poetry, and Winter Tails, animal fables from around the world, written in collaboration with her husband AJ Dean. Jackie talks about how the menopause impacted her creativity as an author.

When I was a little girl, before either puberty or the internet had arrived, anything to do with the female reproductive system was a mystery. Today, even primary school children are familiar with proper medical terms that me and my classmates would have sniggered at in the playground. And information once available only in the problem pages of Jackie magazine are now commonplace in teatime TV ads, embellished with happy young women on various items of skating equipment.

‘The Change’ used to be the enigmatic moniker for the menopause, spoken of in hushed tones throughout the bingo halls and launderettes of the land. I would hear snatched conversations between the women of my mother’s generation, hinting at the secret suffering they bore that men definitely wouldn’t understand. I never asked what they meant. It all sounded rather scary.

Now we have numerous books, documentaries, and even sitcoms shouting about the menopause, as my generation and the glamorous celebs therein reach this milestone, along with all the proper medical terms for this time of anti-puberty. The word ‘change’ has been resigned to the age of black and white TV sets and phones tethered to the wall, and I wondered why. But ‘Change’ is one of the best descriptions I could offer to anyone, having now reached the end of it myself.

Sadly, there is so much pressure today not to change. Cover the grey hair, plump out that wrinkled skin, pretend you’re your daughter’s best friend and borrow her clothes. But everything about the menopause is change, and I discovered, after several years of anguish, that the best way to get through it is to embrace it.

I earn my living as a writer. There are many symptoms associated with the menopause, and everyone experiences them differently. I could tolerate all the messy stuff - night sweats, excessive periods, hair thinning in some places while hair appeared alarmingly in new places - but the worst symptom for me was brain fog.

I couldn’t write. The thing I was best at, and the thing that gave me most comfort and joy, was suddenly unavailable. The more I tried to concentrate, the harder it was to produce anything, and everything I did write at the time was hard won and exhausting. This went on for several years. It triggered depression and frustration, which just led to more exhaustion. I couldn’t see an end to it and really thought I had lost the ability to write permanently.

Anything creative has always been healing for me, so when things became too difficult, I found myself looking for alternative ways to create. I started to crochet again - something I’d loved since childhood - and began writing patterns. Soon I was selling them to national craft magazines and teaching workshops, which was a much-needed income boost. I had been a musician all through my twenties but thought I was now too old. Picking up my bass guitar again, I found I hadn’t lost the ability to play at all and even guested at a London show for an old friend. Creativity was back, just in a different form.

I was going ‘through the change,’ and the things I was choosing to spend my time with were also changing, along with my body shape and the ability to run for buses. The more I adapted to what I was now able - and sometimes no longer able - to do, the less depressed I became.

I’m now through that change, and the ‘through’ aspect is vital. I came out the other side after all the messy stuff was over, and I was able to write again. I’ve since published two novels, a collection of short stories, several plays, and novel number three is out this summer. I’ve embraced the grey hair and accepted that my laughter lines are actually wrinkles. And as for dressing like a teenager, what the hell. I can wear what I like because I care less about what people think than I did when I was twenty!

Now that the menopause is behind me and I’m entering a new phase of life as a woman, what have I learnt that’s worth sharing with those who are yet to reach it? Firstly, change is coming, whether you like it or not. It’s your choice to get swamped by the tsunami or surf across its waves. Don’t fight the change, be a participant in it. Try new things, bake a cake, learn a foreign language, paint a picture, meditate. Buy new clothes for your new shape, change your hair colour, or embrace the grey and save a fortune at the hairdressers. Then, when your old friends return, like writing did for me, you’ll have new ones to join them.