Confessions of a Midlife Over-Tolerator

I am very good at solving things. Give me a target and I hit it; give me a problem and I out-plan it. This is a story about the one thing that hasn't worked, and how long it took me to notice I'd been handed my own patience and told it was a cure. It starts, like most of my problems do, before I've finished my coffee.

The first call is at 8:30am, so I'm up by 6:30. Protein shake, because thirty grams before nine is the rule now, and getting it all from a plate that's mostly dal and paneer takes actual planning. I've soaked the sprouts, with a close fistful of nuts. I've measured the curd, and did not succeed in making ambli for a good gut. As I sip my coffee, I know that it is either extending my liver's life or spiking my cortisol, and that I've already missed the nine-minute window for morning sun.

I do more than is needed. I always have. It's the thing that got me here, the belief that if I plan a little further ahead and put in a little extra, the outcome will bend my way.

So I bring that to my body too. The tracker, the daily macros, the supplements lined up like a small pharmacy by the diary. The well-travelled journal with wilted corners shows and hides a variety of my inner monologue about this mind and this body, and there is ever more to be written.

On paper, I'm doing everything right.

And I am tired. Not sleepy-tired.

But again, everyone's tired. My mother was tired her whole life and never titled it anything.

My friends are tired.

So I put up with it, take it “in my stride” and I “keep going” — except some nights it refuses to be defended. 4am, wide awake, heart palpitating as if I'd sprinted somewhere. I see my husband breathing beside me, fast asleep, that beauty. And then the alarm goes, and the feeling gets folded back into the morning, because what else is there to do with it?

So I deal with it the way the women in this world always have, with my hands. I try turmeric milk with black pepper at night, methi seeds — as a matter of fact, not the seeds but only the water — soaked overnight and drunk first thing, because Instagram tells me for certain that it cools the body. This, with other little gems (or are they?) of knowledge, is widely shared amongst my friends.

A colleague of mine, Chinese, laughed gently when she caught me refilling a bottle of cold water and said her grandmother would have scolded me for it, because bodies our age need warmth, never cold, never raw. The next week she left red dates and goji berries on my desk, a fistful to boil into a sweet red tea meant to build the blood back, the qi, whatever it is we're all quietly losing. So now it all sits together by my desk: the protein scoop and the red date tea, the new science and the old care, all amalgamated into some system that most women my age will relate to, but not fully understand.

Honestly, I couldn't tell you which one is working. But the tea, at least, tastes like someone paid attention.

It was only when it got loud enough that I finally went to a doctor — and another, and another, seven to date. These are the parts that still make me angry, visibly angry. The stiff shoulder went to the bone doctor who told me about calcium RDAs. The palpitations bought me three heart tests, a painful scan and multiple pricks, all clean, all fine, and not once did anyone say the word hormones out loud. And I haven't bought the $988 mattress that will align with my spine and my chakras to get the sleep I deserve.

And my mood walks with impossible heels into every room except the one I need.

So I stopped going. I decided I was overreacting.

And that's what I felt stuck with — not the symptoms, but how quickly I agreed to be the problem.

I'm someone who fixes things by trying harder; it has never once failed me at work. So when my body didn't respond, I assumed I simply hadn't tried hard enough. More protein, better sleep, one DIM here and another supplement there.

And underneath all that, the older training persists: don't complain, don't make it about yourself.

So when the system shrugged — and it didn't feel like Atlas — some trained part of me shrugged along with it, almost relieved to put the blame back on my own body. Maybe it's just supposed to be like that.

Here is what I've landed on, slowly, over these mornings.

I keep being told I can live with all of this. And yes, I can — that's the whole trick of the word. I probably won't die of it. I'm living with it right now, optimising around it, out-planning it a day at a time and failing.

But living with something and it being fine are not the same, and somewhere the two got swapped without my say.

What I can tolerate got quietly rebranded as what's acceptable, and I was too busy hitting my targets to notice the swap the world made for me.

I'll keep the red date tea. I'll keep the haldi doodh, the protein, all of it. They help me carry this being. But I've stopped believing that carrying something well is the same as being cared for.

That's the one thing I won't tolerate anymore: being handed my own patience and told it's a treatment.