Julie Murphy

My story doesn't start with a diagnosis. It starts with a slow, creeping loss — of sleep, of desire, of the version of myself I thought I knew. In my late thirties, I noticed it first as insomnia and a vanishing libido. Not dramatic. Just gone. I chalked it up to stress, to being busy, to being a woman.

By my early forties, the weight wouldn't budge no matter what I did. The fatigue was bone-deep. And then came something I wasn't prepared for: symptoms that looked unmistakably like ADHD — scattered thinking, emotional flooding, and rejection sensitivity so severe I nearly walked away from my career. I was a nurse practitioner. I knew bodies. I knew medicine. And I still couldn't get answers.

So I started digging. And what I found stopped me cold. The research on perimenopause and menopause is shockingly thin. The women who came before us were dismissed, undertreated, and largely unstudied. I bounced from provider to provider and heard things I will never forget: you're too young, your periods are too regular, your vagina looks healthy, try coconut oil, it's not normal to dream about sex, if you don't use it you lose it.

Even getting the right hormone prescriptions has been a battle — one I'm still navigating. What became clear as I went deeper into the literature is that women have been profoundly dismissed. Much of what we've been given was studied primarily in men. We have different brains, different chemistry, different needs — and the medicine hasn't caught up.

One finding has stayed with me: multiple studies show that women with a history of ADHD experience significantly more severe menopause symptoms. No randomized controlled trials yet — but the signal is unmistakable, and for those of us living it, it has never been surprising. We were always more sensitive to hormonal shifts. We were just never believed.