Are you ok now?
Someone asks me this after almost every talk. Here is my honest answer.
I am not only ok.
I am phenomenal.
I know that might sound like something you say to end a conversation. But I mean it in the most literal, measurable, lived sense of the word. I have changed everything — how I eat, how I sleep, how I move, how I socialize, how I think about my own body. I have never been more fit, healthier, or more energized in my adult life. I genuinely feel better than I did in my twenties.
And I am telling you this not to brag, but because I need you to hear it: so can you.
I wake up every morning ready. Ready for the day, ready to help, ready to keep talking about the thing that nobody was talking about for most of my career. That energy is new. It is a direct result of finally understanding what my body needed — and getting the right support to give it.
But to explain how I got here, I have to take you back to a boardroom. Because that is where everything changed.
The day I knew something had to change
I was in a senior leadership role, running a massive project. I lived and breathed that project every single day. I knew it inside and out.
I was given the opportunity to present to the senior executive team. This was the moment. I prepped. I rehearsed. I knew those slides cold.
The night before, like so many nights before it, I slept maybe three hours.
I woke up exhausted. But I got dressed, and I showed up — because that is what you do when you have spent 25 years building a career and earning a seat in those rooms.
The presentation started well. And then the hot flushes started. Then the heart palpitations. Then the anxiety rolled over me like a wave I couldn’t outswim. My joints ached. And then the worst thing happened — the thing I still find hard to say out loud.
I could not remember any of the slides.
Me. The person who had lived that project for months. Standing in front of the people who needed to trust my leadership, my knowledge, my capability — and I could not find the words.
I made it through. I always made it through. But I walked out of that room knowing, with absolute clarity, that something had to change.
What I didn’t know yet was that what happened to me in that room had a name. It wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t incompetence. It wasn’t burnout, or anxiety, or not being cut out for the pressure.
It was perimenopause. And I had been navigating it alone, without language, without support, and without anyone around me ever saying the word, for over fifteen years.
25 years in corporate. 15 years suffering in silence.
I held high roles throughout my career. From the outside, I was doing well. Inside, I was white-knuckling through symptoms I didn’t understand — the brain fog, the sleepless nights, the exhaustion that never fully lifted, the emotions that felt disproportionate, the body that seemed to be working against me.
Not once did a doctor, a colleague, a manager, or anyone in my life connect what I was experiencing to hormones. To menopause. To the completely normal, completely manageable transition that millions of women go through while holding down careers, families, and lives.
The word was simply never said.
And so I did what high-achieving women do: I pushed through. I performed. I adapted. I quietly convinced myself that something was wrong with me specifically, rather than understanding that my body was going through something universal that our workplaces have simply never been equipped to talk about.
Why I left corporate to start Menovate
When I finally got the right information — when I found the support, the knowledge, the community, the tools — the transformation was not gradual. It was profound.
And the first thing I felt, after the relief, was anger.
Not destructive anger. The kind that clarifies. The kind that makes you look at your 25-year career and think: how many women are sitting in boardrooms right now, going through exactly what I went through, with no idea what is happening to them?
I became a certified menopause coach. I built Menovate. I walked away from the career I had built to do the work I couldn’t stop thinking about.
And here is what I did not expect: I built the most meaningful chapter of my professional life during menopause. Not in spite of it — because of what it taught me, what it drove me to do, and who I became on the other side of it.
You can start an entirely new career during menopause. I am living proof.
What I want you to take from this
Going through menopause does not have to be awful. I know it can feel that way — I lived that version for fifteen years. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Getting the right support makes a real difference. Knowledge is not just comforting — it is genuinely powerful. When you understand what is happening in your body, you stop fighting yourself and start working with yourself. Everything shifts.
If you are in the middle of it right now — exhausted, confused, quietly disappearing from the version of yourself you used to know — I want you to hear this directly:
You are not broken. You are not weak. You are not losing your edge.
You are going through something real, something significant, and something that you deserve real support for.
That support exists. That knowledge is available. And on the other side of it, I promise you: there is a version of you who wakes up energized, who feels better than she has in decades, who is ready.
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It’s time to say the word — and change what happens next.
Aimee Debow, Founder, Menovate.ca Menopause Certified Coach