Fabulous and Falling Apart: My Birthday Thoughts

By Denise Scott

I turned 52 this week. Shhhhhhh! Don’t tell anybody! I am still pretending to be in my early 40s, but if you called me and I didn’t answer. then this article is for you.

No really. Put down whatever you’re doing. This is your explanation, your apology, and your invitation all at once. Because I owe a lot of people a phone call, and since anxiety has made phone calls feel like preparing for a UN summit, an article will have to do.

Firstly, I am not ducking you. I want you to know that. I love you. I probably thought about calling you back at least four times. I picked up the phone. I put down the phone. I stared at the phone like it had personally offended me. And then I put it face-down under my pillow, put it on airplane mode, went and lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling and asked the Lord why is this so hard?

That is where I have been.

Right there. On that bed. Under that ceiling. Fabulous on the outside (because I did my hair and nails for this), falling apart on the inside, and deeply, profoundly ashamed of both.

Here is what nobody tells you about turning 52 or at least, nobody told me. I had a whole picture in my head of what this age would look like. Elegant. Sorted. Sophisticated. The kind of woman who wears linen without it wrinkling, who has a skincare routine with more than two steps, who at least remembers to ‘cream she foot’ before leaving home or who exhales slowly and says things like: ‘I’m at peace with my journey.’

Instead, I am here diagnosing myself on ChatGPT at midnight, avoiding my WhatsApp notifications like they are debt collectors, and trying to explain to myself how a woman who can walk into a room of 300 people and own it completely, can come home from that same room and not function for three days.

How does that happen? Somebody explain this to me. Because I have been the life of the party. Literally. The one who knows everybody, who can have a full conversation in a car park with a total stranger and exchange numbers and become genuine friends. That woman is real. She is me.

But so is the woman who comes home from being her, crawls into the quiet, and completely unravels, with no explanation.

And for a long time (too long) I have been ashamed of that second woman. Because she doesn’t fit the brand. She is not on the vision board. She is deeply inconvenient to the image of someone who is supposed to have it together, who people look to, who writes the blog and hosts the podcast and runs the businesses and shows up every single week with something to say.

She is not fabulous. And I have been pretending she doesn’t exist.

But here is my 52nd birthday revelation, offered to you free of charge and straight from the ceiling where I have been doing most of my thinking:

I am tired of being ashamed of falling apart.

I am tired of performing recovery. Tired of pretending, “I’m fine, just been busy” when what I want to say is: “I am not fine. I am lying here in my feelings.  I don’t know when I developed anxiety, but she has moved in and she is very comfortable and I don’t know how to ask her to leave.”

Because somewhere between building everything, I was supposed to build and being everything I was supposed to be, anxiety arrived. Unannounced. No knock, no warning, no courtesy. Just settled right in like she owns the place, eating my peace and rearranging my nervous system.

And now I, who used to be the first to call, the first to show up, the first to say, “talk to me, I’m here”, I am the one going silent. Missing. Unreachable. And hating myself for it, which, as you can imagine, helps absolutely nothing.

Here is what I’ve since learnt. Perimenopause doesn’t just change your body. It rewires your brain. Estrogen, that wonderfully dramatic hormone, plays a direct role in how we regulate mood, manage stress, and process anxiety. So, women who never had an anxious day in their lives are suddenly finding themselves overwhelmed by crowds, hollowed out after social events, and lying awake at 3 a.m. rehearsing conversations that happened in 2019.

This is not madness. This is menopause. But and this is the part I need you to really hear, it can also be more than menopause. And both things deserve proper attention, not just prayer and pushing through (trust me I know).

Now I say that as a woman of faith. A Catholic woman, specifically which means I come from a long and noble tradition of quietly suffering and calling it holiness. We are exceptional at this. We light candles, we offer it up, we live in adoration chapels, we smile at the sign of peace while internally holding entire storms. Pretending to be okay while absolutely falling apart.  Can you imagine how enriched our lives would be if we all could just be honest about what we are really going through?

And I am here to tell you that offering it up and getting help are not mutually exclusive. God made therapists. God made doctors. God made that one trusted friend who will sit with you and not try to fix you. Use all of them. Use them without shame. So, to everyone I haven’t called back, I see you. I miss you. I am not fabulous right now, and I have spent too long being embarrassed about that because fabulous is what  I think everyone expects from me.

But here is what I’m choosing at 52: honesty over performance. Real over polished. The full woman, the one who owns the room and the one who needs three days to recover from owning the room. It is what it is…Until it isn’t.

Both of them are me. Both of them are valid. And neither of them should be ashamed.

If you recognise yourself anywhere in these words: the hiding, the silence, the gap between who you are in public and who you are when the door closes you are not broken. You are not failing. You are human, and probably hormonal, and possibly in need of a good doctor, a good therapist, and at minimum, one person you can tell the truth to.

Talk to someone. Please.

And if you called me and I didn’t answer I promise, it wasn’t you.

It was me. Fabulous, falling apart, and finally, finally, learning that those two things can exist in the same woman.

Happy birthday to me. 🎂

Disclaimer: If you see my friend Anushka who was my day on at Holy Faith Convent, Couva,  she identifies as a 33 year old  and you should in no way assume she is as old as me just because we were born in the same year.