A perimenopausal fortnight, described, not fixed

For a year she had been told it was stress. She agreed it was stress. She also suspected it was something else, but she had no language for it that did not feel either dramatic or apologetic. She had stopped raising it with her GP because the visits ended in the same shrug. She had begun to wonder if she was making it up.

She did not start a new app. She did not buy a sensor. For two weeks, every evening, she wrote four lines: how the day had felt; what had surprised her about her body; what had surprised her about her mood; what she had wanted to say and had not. At the end of the fortnight she gave the fourteen entries to a reasoning chat tool and asked, simply, what shape it heard.

The work was four honest lines a night and one careful read-back. The chat tool did not diagnose, did not advise, did not prescribe. It described — in her own words, drawn from her own evenings — a shape that her year of "stress" had blurred. She used the description to write a one-page note for her GP and to move a recurring 8am meeting to 11am.

Her assistant, who had not been told, mentioned the 11am meetings were going better.