The Great Unbecoming: When Your Brain Deletes Who You Had to Be

That low-key, keep-the-peace version of you? She’s officially unavailable.

There’s actual brain chemistry behind why you suddenly can’t tolerate things you used to accept without question. Like, actual neurochemical shifts happening in your brain right now that make going back to your old life physiologically impossible.

Not hard. Impossible.

When the popular girl leaves the party, everyone goes

Think of estrogen as the friend who organized everything. She’s the one who made sure everyone showed up on time, played nice, did their jobs. The glue holding the entire group together.

When estrogen drops during menopause, she doesn’t just leave.

She takes everyone with her.

BDNF—brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is basically your brain’s construction crew—was building new neurons, creating connections, keeping existing ones alive. Estrogen controlled how much BDNF you made. Without her, your brain loses its ability to repair and rebuild itself as well.

Acetylcholine depended on estrogen too. That’s your memory keeper. This is why you walk into rooms and have no idea why you’re there. It’s not you losing your mind. It’s chemistry.

Glutamate—the stuff that drives neural activity and learning—drops in your prefrontal cortex when estrogen falls. So yeah. Slower thinking. Harder to learn new things. Memory formation gets weaker.

GABA is where it gets weird. The synthesis drops, but not in a simple way. The whole system gets dysregulated. You end up with too much inhibition in the wrong places (hello, brain fog) and not enough calming where you actually need it (hello, anxiety at 3am about nothing specific).

And serotonin and dopamine? We already know those tank. Mood crashes. Motivation disappears. The things that used to bring you pleasure don’t.

But this isn’t just about loss. It’s about what becomes impossible to ignore once the neurochemical buffer is gone.

The death part nobody warned you about

Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote about the Life-Death-Life cycle in “Women Who Run with the Wolves.”

Menopause is the death part.

Not the death of you.

The death of who you had to be.

Everything goes through cycles of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. Relationships. Identities. Creative projects. Your beliefs about yourself. Every phase of your life.

That version of yourself who could accommodate everyone. The one who pushed through exhaustion. Who stayed small to make others comfortable. Who performed agreeability like her life depended on it. Who said yes when she meant no, smiled when she was furious, kept going when her body was screaming stop.

That version is dying.

And your neurochemistry is making absolutely sure you can’t resurrect her.

Because here’s what’s happening. Your brain isn’t just losing support. It’s being rewired.

Your brain is shutting down to rebuild. Like a system update, you can’t cancel.

The woman you were? She couldn’t have handled what’s coming next. She wasn’t built for it. So she has to die to make room for who you’re becoming.

I know that sounds dramatic. But think about it. If your brain is literally restructuring itself, do you really think you’re going to want the same things? Care about the same stuff? Tolerate the same patterns?

When you realize you want completely different things

Maybe you spent your twenties and thirties trying to get somewhere. Build something. Prove something. Achieve the things you thought would make you feel successful, worthy, and enough.

And now you’re here, late forties or early fifties, and you suddenly don’t give a shit about those things anymore.

The career ladder looks pointless. Networking exhausts you. The performance of who you’re supposed to be feels impossible to maintain.

You want silence. Space. Time that isn’t accounted for. Relationships that don’t require you to shrink. Work that actually means something instead of just generating income. Permission to say “I don’t want to” without having to justify it.

This isn’t a crisis. This is clarity.

When your serotonin and dopamine drop, you stop getting pleasure hits from things that don’t actually matter to you. When your nervous system becomes hypersensitive, you can’t tolerate what doesn’t serve you. When BDNF decreases, your brain stops building neural pathways around things that aren’t essential.

Your brain is doing triage—keeping what matters, cutting what doesn’t.

Your nervous system lost its shock absorber

Estrogen was protecting your nerves. Wrapped them in a coating. Kept inflammation down. Regulated how pain signals got processed. Maintained your body’s thermostat. Kept cortisol from going haywire.

Without it, your nervous system’s volume knob got cranked way up.

Pain that wouldn’t have registered before suddenly matters. Sounds are louder. Lights are brighter. Tags in your clothes make you want to scream. Your emotional reactions feel bigger—and they are, because your stress response is stuck in overdrive.

You’re not being dramatic. You’re not suddenly “too sensitive.” Your pain receptors are literally more sensitive now. Your stress response is hyperactive. Your nerves are inflamed and sending signals they shouldn’t send.

Which means something important: what you could tolerate before, you actually can’t anymore.

Not “shouldn’t have to.” Can’t. Your nervous system will not allow it.

I see women in my practice all the time who think they’re failing at life because they suddenly can’t handle things that never bothered them before. The noise. The demands. The constant accommodation. And they’re trying to white-knuckle their way through it like they just need to try harder.

But you can’t force a nervous system that’s been stripped of its shock absorber to stop reacting. That’s not how this works.

The part where you stop performing

People-pleasing behaviors decrease after menopause. Not because you took a workshop on boundaries or read the right self-help book.

Because the neurochemical machinery that enabled constant accommodation literally broke down.

The serotonin that kept you calm and agreeable? Gone. The dopamine that made you seek approval? Depleted. The GABA that inhibited your actual responses? Dysregulated. The estrogen that buffered your nervous system’s response to stress? Not there.

What’s left is you. Without the chemical cushioning that made you palatable.

And yeah, that’s uncomfortable. For you and for everyone who benefited from the old version.

But you can’t go back. Your brain won’t let you. Your nervous system will reject every attempt to perform the old patterns. It’ll feel wrong in your body in a way you can’t override.

Neurochemically upgraded

You’re not falling apart.

You’re being rebuilt from the inside out. The demolition phase looks like a disaster when you’re still standing in the rubble.

But after menopause? Gray matter recovers. ATP production increases. Your brain finds a new baseline. The fog lifts. The nervous system recalibrates.

And then you’re left with a version of yourself that knows what she actually wants. Who has a functioning bullshit detector that can’t be overridden. Who has lost the ability to fake enthusiasm for things that don’t matter.

This is the upgrade. Not the decline.

The second half of your life isn’t about doing more, achieving more, being more. It’s about being exactly who you are with the people and pursuits that deserve your energy.

Your brain is making sure you don’t waste it.

So if you’re looking at your life right now and thinking, “I can’t do this anymore”—about your job, your relationship, your living situation, your daily routine, your social obligations—you’re right.

You can’t.

Your neurochemistry is making that impossible.

There’s nothing wrong with you.

Your brain is under construction.

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What’s the one thing you used to tolerate that you absolutely can’t anymore? I’m curious to know.

I’m reading every word here. I can’t get to everyone, but thank you for sharing.

I’m building a space for women who are done performing. If this resonated with you, stick around. There’s more where this came from, and we’re just getting started.