On Your Own, But Not By Yourself, with Sasha Davies
Change is one of life’s greatest challenges, and it can also be a primary source of isolation. While no one can walk our paths for us, we can most certainly be accompanied. In this conversation with Sasha Davies, we explore her varied professional journey, the ins and outs of her work as a writer, and what she’s learned about major life transitions such as menopause. Sasha is the author of The Menopause Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Owning Your Transition from Peri- to Post.
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Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, coach, writer, and amateur ecologist living in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi, friend, and welcome. I hope that you are feeling into the fullness of the summer season. We're still here in this early summer Cancerian stage, and there is so much that's ripe. The fruit here is really going off, on its way, sustaining us. And we are also on the bending arc toward the dark part of the year.
And both of those things are happening at the same time. And I've been thinking a lot about shifting seasons, shifting dynamics in the world, shifting bodies. And I'm realizing how much presence with the current season we're in, and really savoring what is right here in front of us, can make those transitions so much smoother -that if we can really enjoy what's here with us or be present with it, if it's not enjoyable in this moment, but if we can really be with the summer season, then we can much more gracefully transition into the fall and the winter, the time of death and darkness and be with it in a way that I think is really mature and just kind of continues that presence.
And not only is presence and kind of savoring the season of life that we're in really valuable in and of itself, but also in helping us to transition to whatever is to come. It's also so helpful in those transitions to understand what is the next sort of thing and ways to be with it. If we have been through a fall or a winter and we can remember what that's like, how to take care of ourselves through that, it can make it much less scary and much easier to do the letting go and the death and dying that's necessary in those seasons.
And, you know, sometimes we act like work is separate from our bodies, but the truth is that work is never separate from our bodies. It can't happen without them. Everything that you do in the world comes through the channel of your physical form. And so, when my friend Sasha told me that she was writing a book about menopause, I was so relieved first, just because now I get to benefit from her wisdom as I approach that gateway.
But I was also really curious about what that transition might teach us about stepping further into our gifts, into perhaps a different kind of fertility. And how can really being with where we are now and understanding what's to come help us make that transition if it's a part of our physical makeup or part of our path, how can we do that in a way that is as graceful as possible, and you'll hear from Sasha today that it's not always that way. It is messy, just like life.
Sasha also has a really interesting working journey, and so I'm excited for you to get to be in her presence today. She's just a delightful person. Before I introduce you to Sasha, I want to let you know that I'm taking some time off to travel to England in a couple of weeks, for a couple of weeks.
So I will share more about that trip soon. It has connections to the work that I do, but I'm not quite ready to talk about it and haven't even been on it yet, but you can keep your eye out for the next podcast episode around July 27th, the end of July.
So let me introduce Sasha to you. Sasha Davies is the author of The Menopause Companion: a beginner's guide to owning your transition from peri to post.
She writes to make people feel less alone, herself included, in their achingly human and sometimes embarrassing everyday struggles. She's particularly drawn to things we're not supposed to talk about. Like the monstrous feelings like envy and jealousy, mistakes and failure that lack an iterative upside, middle body stuff, middle life stuff, and topics we're supposed to understand but maybe don't. Like, can we survive climate change? What's the economy for? And why we should even care about outer space?
So, I'm so excited to bring Sasha's insights and experience to you all today. Before we dive in, I will share our opening invocation and give us a moment to just sort of settle in. So wherever you are, you can take a deep breath, notice your body and time and space. Maybe you set an intention to just be open to whatever this conversation has for you today.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with.
I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlith and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
All right, Sasha, thank you so much for being here today.
Sasha: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I'm so flattered that you asked.
Megan: So you have a really interesting, I think, professional path. And I would love if you could give, I know that there's parts of it I don't even know about, I would love if you could give us sort of an overview of where you've been in your working life, some of the major roles or themes, some of the work that you have created, whatever you want to share about kind of the arc of your working journey thus far.
Sasha: Absolutely. This question always seems like it should be a very straightforward question, right? As any question about your own life and experience does, but it is surprisingly challenging. It was a, it was really fun to sit down and make a very long list of all the things that I've done and the roles that I've had, but I came back to something that I had done with a career coach a few years ago, where they asked me to draw a map of my career trajectory or my work experience, some version of that. And it still feels like the clearest distillation of that arc to me. And I, without planning to, I ended up drawing this image that is oriented around the type of bag that I carried to my job.
So that's how I'm going to tell you today, because that's kind of what still makes sense to me. And I think part of it is because those objects seem to say more about what I was up to and how I saw myself Than my job title does.
So the, the kind of, you know, early part of my working life is what I call the backpack era.
So it's very much that like school and then post school kind of job. And mostly what I did was I always had retail oriented and service jobs generally in, you know, food businesses, clothing businesses, and I did those even after I graduated from college. I was not someone who had a very clear sense of a career path at all.
I still wouldn't say that I have that. And I felt a little bit both overwhelmed. And I felt like I was supposed to know how to go and find myself a "capital J" job and I really didn't know how to go about that. So when I, when I came out of school, I was interested in doing environmental work, which now maybe someone would refer to as like climate justice work.
And I just found that I could only find unpaid volunteer or internship positions, and I just didn't really get how I was going to do that and pay my rent. So I went and got the kind of job I understood that had a paycheck attached to it, which was kind of an hourly service job. So that was my backpack era.
When I decided, okay, it's time to be a little bit more adult, I moved into the messenger bag era. And I decided I need to get a job in an office because that's what I thought being an adult meant. So because I didn't know what industry, I started out applying with temp agencies. And I felt like I didn't even really understand how to do that because the first few jobs I got sent out on were kind of manual labor jobs because I didn't type very fast.
And that was still something that they asked you in the, what was that? The late 1990s. So anyway, so I got, I kind of had my break with having a grownup, what I thought of as a grownup job when I got assigned to a, I got a temp assignment at Charles Schwab in their corporate offices and I was just doing basic data entry, but someone there noticed that I, you know, worked hard, showed up on time, and seemed capable, and offered to bring me on full time initially, just to keep doing that work, but then they trained me in project management.
I spent the next five years doing that kind of work there, and it was satisfying. They had a great salary. It had great health benefits, paid vacation. And I did that for about five years. And then I realized I couldn't see myself spending another 15 or 20 years doing that.
And I, I looked at the people kind of up the ladder, even just director or vice president, and it just didn't look like work I wanted to do. So around that same time, I happened to meet my now husband, and he was planning on going to graduate school. I was a little bit worried if he did that, I would never live anywhere else.
I had this idea that If you go to graduate school in an area, you meet people in that area, and then you get work in that area and you stay. So I talked him into moving to the other side of the country. We went to New York city and the plan was to go for one year and we stayed for about six. Yeah. So anyway, that, that was a big shift for me and my first experience of, you know, going quite, quite far away and moving somewhere.
That's not true. I was going to say it was my first experience of moving somewhere where I didn't know anyone, but I did that after college too. Anyway, we went to New York and I had this idea that I was going to move to this place where there were all kinds of opportunities and that it would just be very apparent what I was going to do for work and with my time. I really wanted to do something different than what I had been doing at Schwab. And I just had a rude awakening where I realized that my lack of career understanding had come with me across the country.
So I did try some different kinds of things. I got introduced to some people who did a great project related to, it was something that came in the wake of the September 11th attacks, which was a, it was called a sonic memorial. So they took in sounds over voicemail and submitted tapes and discs where people talked about, shared their memories of people they'd lost or what their experience was on that day. They had all this old audio footage of the, like, Building stewardesses that stood outside the World Trade Center as it was being built and talked to people about how amazing the building was, you know, it was a fascinating, fun, fun thing to participate in and they taught me some very rudimentary editing, audio editing skills.
And I volunteered there for a while. I feel like I did a couple other things. I assisted a filmmaker a little bit. Just sort of floated around until I couldn't tolerate being unpaid anymore. And then I went back and did project management work in financial services for another year. And that was kind of the final push I needed to decide to, like, Just start over and try something new.
Even though at the time I thought I was too old to do that, which is hilarious to me now, because I was all of 30 years old at the time, which now seems like, Oh my God, you've got everything in front of you, but anyway. So that, that decision to leave that type of work was also quite frankly, it was the end of me having a job that paid me a living wage and provided health insurance and other, you know, benefits. I didn't know that at the time that that was how that was going to play out, but I think, I think it's just really important to be transparent about.
So when I left that, I had a very short list of things that I thought would be interesting to, to do as work.
This was like the high time for this American life on NPR, at least in my, in my world, in my circle. And so I thought it would be really cool to learn how to make radio stories like that. That was one thing I thought about. And then the other thing, and I wish so much that I could remember how this came up, but literally the other idea I had was to work in cheese.
So I looked into both of those, and creating radio documentaries was very clearly quite competitive and would have required financial investment of school, moving to a different place. And I wasn't really clear what the return on investment would be for those things. Whereas with cheese, in New York City, which sounds bonkers because no one's making cheese in New York City... and so I did that and started out working as an unpaid intern, and then, you know, after a few months, joined their staff. And really, I, when I say working in the cheese industry, I'll be, that also is something that makes sense to me, but not to the broader public. So, I worked for a company that imported cheese from Europe and then brought cheese in from around the country and they sold to restaurants throughout New York City and they also shipped cheese around the U. S. to retail customers. And the person who owned that also had a restaurant, so they had a huge, you know, amazing like 200 -cheese cheese bar in this restaurant that was extraordinary and so ridiculous and fun. And then they also had this, so they had this center where they received all the cheese, took care of it, cut it, wrapped it, sent it out to all these different places.
And then they also offered classes to the public, cheese tastings and things like that. I like fell completely in love with that work, with everything related to cheese. I loved working in the food business, I think both because I found it genuinely interesting, but also because it had this like cool quotient and I'd never had a job that anyone thought was cool.
So I basically spent the next, gosh, the next 15 years working in cheese and food in all kinds of different ways. I would say probably a year into my experience, I went and visited a cheese maker. That was like a farmstead cheese maker where they have their own animals and they make the cheese right there.
And something about that experience made me want to document what I saw there. I didn't, I don't know that I really knew how to, how I was going to do that. But so that I could share it with people who came in to buy cheese and even other people working behind cheese counters with me who knew like so little, you know, we had like the paragraph we could find on the cheese makers website, if they had a website to describe these products and what they were and how they were made.
So that light bulb moment of that first visit led to what I would say was my first creative project, kind of the beginning of my like self-expression in a more creative format, which was a project called Cheese by Hand. My husband and I took four months and drove around the United States and visited about 40 artisan cheese makers and stayed with them, and made cheese with them, interviewed them, made a podcast from that, and then kept a blog while we were on that route.
And it was transformative in so, so, so many ways. I just really felt like I was exactly where I wanted to be and exactly where I was supposed to be. It was super satisfying. And when we came back to New York, At the end of that trip, I really didn't know what, it didn't seem like I could want to go back to working behind a cheese counter, I really wasn't sure what the next step was, and mostly what I wanted was to write a book using all this information I had collected on this trip.
Oddly, I'd had an agent reach out to me before we started the trip, and so when we came back, I went through the process of writing a book proposal with, with some help from her, and she took that proposal and shopped it around to no avail. And it was a really, that was also part of the creative experience I want to offer, which was really just learning to take some declines or rejections and take feedback from people.
I think I wish that I had gotten more guidance about, about how to go through that process, but we can, we can talk about books a little bit later. Anyway, so I ended up working at a great spot. Running a little retail shop that was connected to a restaurant, the kind of place that's totally ubiquitous now, but felt pretty special at the time, but I also was starting to feel this itch to return to a less urban landscape and back to the west coast. So it took us a little while to do that. But when we got back to the west coast, we came to Portland and I was once again in this situation where I didn't know anyone who lived here. We had moved here because It was less expensive than California, and any time we had been to Portland, we had really loved it, but I didn't know anyone here.
And so I found that all of the credibility I had amassed in a different city didn't really have as much of an impact here - didn't open doors the way I thought that it might, and I wanted to keep working in food. So I kind of muddled around and picked up a day at a cheese counter somewhere.
And then I got very lucky when another cheese blogger, which was an entire category of blogs at that time, reached out to me and said, "Hey, I got this inquiry from a publisher who wants to write a book about West Coast cheeses." She had already signed a deal with a different publisher. And so she had given them my name and that ended up working out. And I wrote my first cheese book, which was very different than the book I had imagined. It was a kind of encyclopedic view of West Coast cheeses being produced on the West Coast at that time, but it taught me how to go through that process and definitely gave me a window to think of myself and see myself as a writer, which was a powerful, powerful experience.
I still needed to figure out what I was going to do for a full time job because I couldn't really imagine how I would write full time. I wasn't compelled to do journalistic writing. And to, you know, be that person who's pitching ideas to editors all the time. And so I, I kind of went with this hybrid of what I knew, which was I wanted to work in a food service business, maybe a retail business, and I couldn't find a place where I wanted to work in Portland.
So I made my own. I can hear how crazy that sounds now. It felt very logical at the time. I ended up opening basically a wine bar and restaurant and event space with my husband, who's a winemaker. So the winery was housed in the same building. Beautiful space. It was an amazing experiment and it was really, really, really hard. We did something totally insane, which is to open two businesses at the same time. One that has notoriously tiny margins and the other, which requires years of investment before you have a product to earn back that money. So we learned a lot and we did that for five years and then decided to close.
And there was another cheese book that happened in there, which I know that sounds very glib, but it came to me in a very similar way that the first opportunity did, it was not something I pitched. It was a discard from another colleague of mine in the, in the cheese business. And that book was a delight to work on. And I realized that was a bit of a window into understanding that I really enjoyed a more collaborative process. I worked very closely with a photographer and a recipe writer on that book. That was really a blast. Anyway, so we closed the restaurant at that point.
My husband, he's always had a day job throughout all of this, even through the five years of the restaurant and the winery. So I've been very much, you know, we've been financially dependent on his work, and he got an opportunity for a job in Los Angeles. That was a great job in terms of experience for him and was going to give us an opportunity to sort of like stabilize ourselves. So, once again, I was in a city where I didn't know anyone without a job, at a major turning point for myself. This was a really tricky one in the sense that I had not only closed a business, but I think I understood when I closed that business that that was the end of my career in food, mostly because I had sort of drifted away from my original focus on cheese, and so I couldn't really see going back into that part, and I really didn't want to go work in a restaurant.
So I was trying to start over yet again.
One of the things I had enjoyed most about owning my own business was the interacting with and mentoring and developing the people that worked with us. And I thought that a logical place to go with that was to look at working in human resources, because I could at least, in the kind of learning and development part of human resources, I might have access to helping people, coaching people. And this was a really, this was where one, I would just definitely put it out there that, that this transition out of owning the business. out of the food industry into a new city at, you know, in my early 40s was really, I think, more emotionally tricky for me than I understood at the time.
Like, looking back, I just kind of feel very tender to myself going through that experience. And I, again, was kind of in a position where I didn't have the background in this exact kind of work, so I needed someone to take a chance on me and be willing to train me. And I don't think that's a horrible position to be in, but I do think that sometimes, well, in my situation, it made me maybe miss some things about the job offer that I was able to get. I just felt grateful that anyone would offer me something and I took a job that seemed like it was going to be great and just didn't turn out to be that way for a variety of reasons.
The one thing it did give me an opportunity to see was that, that human resources was to some extent a very different kind of job than what I had envisioned. I tried to do that job for, I stuck it out for about a year and a half, which I think was probably 12 months too long, but during that time, a side project that I had worked on just out of a complete personal interest in a very seemingly kind of outside unrelated topic. I had self published a small booklet about menopause, largely because I had watched a couple friends go through this thing and realized I had no idea what it was and that I was also going to go through it.
And this was when Trump was campaigning and things just felt absolutely insanely misogynistic and rough. I felt even more compelled, I think, to try to offer the one skill I felt like I had to that conversation, which was to write about it and find out what I could and write about it in a plain language way that people could understand, even just to share with my friends and their friends.
Basically what happened is my very first acquiring editor for my, for my first cheese book, she had moved to a different press over the years and that press wanted to do a menopause book. And so she thought of me because she had kept tabs on me and knew that I had written this booklet and reached out to me and said, how would you feel about making that a full length book?
Yeah. So that brings us basically right up to what I've been doing now.
Megan: Thank you. Well, my first question is like, what sort of bag phase are you in?
Sasha: So I basically, you know, I went through a really cute leather kind of briefcase -y bag phase when I first moved to New York and I wanted to be fashionable, but I wanted to be grown up and professional.
And then once I started working in food and I was like full throttle in food, it was all about tote bags, just all about canvas tote bags. And one of the things that I found when I got that job in human resources was I had no flipping idea what kind of bag to take to the job. And I was cracking up this morning because I realized that should have been a key indicator that I was in the wrong place! So I think I ended up with like, kind of a cute, fashionable backpack. And I was definitely an outlier at that job, having that bag. And now I work from home, so now I just like take a wallet wherever I go and I don't have to, I don't have to go somewhere to work.
So now I use all the bags, Megan, to answer your question. I have tote bags, I have backpacks. Yeah. Thanks for asking.
Megan: No, I love that. Yeah. No one has ever given me an overview of their working life using bags as like anchors, but that makes a ton of sense. And I love how the HR thing might've been a red flag since there was that question.
Thank you so much for sharing your path. There's a lot that I love about it. Like just the level of, I think, openness and risk and following the opportunities that felt interesting to you and hearing that there was a lot of like, questioning and probably discomfort at each of those junctures, but you followed through on them.
And the other thing that I love is that you mentioned, you know, moving to New York and Portland and LA and always having this sense of kind of starting over in a new city where you didn't know anyone. And, many of the opportunities that have come across your path have been through your community or network or the people that sort of transcend where you live, you know, so I think it's just a helpful reminder that even if we're moving and it feels like we're starting over, we always bring forward our relationships and I think it sounds like for you so many of the collaborations and openings have come through that, which I think is really beautiful.
Sasha: Thanks for saying that. That's very, very, very true. The opportunities have come through, always, always, always come through people. I feel more connected to people I don't live in the same city with than I did 15 years ago.
I think the way that we communicate has shifted. I mean, not to sound like too, to make it too much about the technology, but I think the tools do matter, right? If I think about when I first started working in cheese, like nobody had, like Gmail was brand new. Right? Like that's, I mean people, and then you think about we have smartphones and so you can like keep up with people over text, social media creates a different sense of connectedness.
But I will also say that what you're mentioning is true of any of the creative projects that I've done. Any of the jobs that I've had, which are more like in person, on site, those have benefited much, much more in my experience from knowing people on the ground in the place where I am.
Megan: And I don't know how that is changing with so much remote work now, but I think you're right that both of them still matter a lot and everything that comes through is, like you said, through people, which we can lose sight of sometimes.
So, I want to hear more about your book.
So you started with this pamphlet, which morphed into this larger opportunity. And now you have your latest book, The Menopause Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Owning Your Transition from Peri to Post. Can you talk a little bit about what is included in the book and I'm particularly interested in what you, cause I know that you did a lot of interviews and preparation throughout this book process, I'm really interested in anything you've noticed about how the experience of menopause for people connects with or obstructs or complicates or beautifies the work experience. Because many people who are going through menopause are also still working. And I'd love to hear anything you want to share about that relationship.
Sasha: Yeah, there's a lot in that. So I'll do my best to get started.
So what's kind of great about the way that you just posed those, I feel like there's multiple questions in there, the way you just posed them is that... so when I first heard friends talking about their experiences with menopause, it was when I was trying to decide whether to close the restaurant or not.
And what struck me about it was there was the practicality of what they were talking about, like symptoms they were experiencing. And the symptoms were really frustrating, right? Like not sleeping well, you know, the thing everybody knows about the most common trope, right? This like idea of hot flashes, right? Where you're just like all of a sudden broiling hot and sweating. And those are just like the two off the top. Those are two really easy ones. It's obvious off the top of my head, but the, the thing that I thought was fascinating and talking to both of them is there was some, there was something about the experience that they were having of that physiological transition that looked a lot like the flailing about I was doing about this, like major shift I was about to make in my life.
This change. That what they were going through had really destabilized their idea of themselves and thus their confidence. And that was like, felt like so exactly what was going on with me professionally for very different reasons, but there was something about that and that part of menopause when I looked for information about what happens in the body, what does it mean, how do you prepare for it, all that kind of stuff, that thing, that destabilization, disorientation was nowhere. And actually that's not maybe that's not completely fair. The book that was like the menopause book forever is a book called, I think, The Wisdom of Menopause by this author, Christiane Northrop. And it's one of those doorstopper books. No joke. It's at least 700 pages, right? And I can remember looking through that book at the library or the bookstore and just thinking, geez, if this is what this thing is, this is a nightmare.
Like I have to read 800 pages of text to understand what's about to happen to my body. That's terrifying. So I was interested in writing something that was very, very introductory, like a Cliff's Notes version of that, and it was very, very important to me to address this emotional piece and not address it in a way, because Christiane Northrup would talk about it, at least what I remember of her book, in this way that sort of implied, if you're having a hard time, it means you have issues you haven't dealt with.
And I hated that as an explanation because it felt like blamey and it felt very like It's on you if this is hard for you. Now, that may not be exactly how she meant it, but that was how it landed for me. And I thought, you know, that doesn't feel great. I'd like to try to write something that looked at all of the forces that play during this transition.
So when this editor came to me and said, "would you want to expand this booklet," I definitely felt like I could say more about all of these parts. And I also had this really clear sense that one of the biggest challenges for women is that we feel like our bodies are weird, and weird is like the nice version.
We also tend to feel like our bodies are kind of gross and I, I remember, you know, standing at the women's march in Portland in 2017 and looking at all those people and thinking " we don't have a shot at anything like Equity until we don't think that we're weird..." Until we just feel like we're normal, and we're fine, we're great.
So I wanted that to be represented in the book too. So what I worked to do with The Menopause Companion was to say, okay, here's what happens in your body that you may or may not be aware of. Here's why, you know, something that you think of as related to your reproductive organs actually shows up as symptoms in all these parts of your body that you don't think of as related to those things.
The reason, by the way, is because hormones. There's receptors for those hormones all over your body, but in addition to that, I wanted to explain to people, it's also not just about your body, it's about all these other things, because your body lives in a context, which is called your culture, your geography, past life experiences, all of those things are at play in this transition. And for many, many women, this transition happens around midlife. You know, you cannot ignore that that is going to bring up questions about aging, questions about a transition point if you have children and those children are potentially less reliant and, you know, becoming adults and your sense of yourself as a mother or parent may be also shifting and all of these things, you know, as with any transition...
I think change is pretty value neutral. You know, people like to say "change is great!" And sometimes it is. Changes also can be really, really hard. Especially if they are changes to the way we see ourselves and the way we understand how we fit in to the world, those kinds of changes are rich. Yes, but rich is also kind of a nice way of saying complicated or complex.
Megan: I love that you, one, that this is like a beginner's guide because that seems essential. And two, I really love how you pull in the cultural context because I think that's just so important. I mean, it's just crazy that anyone would talk about it as if it were just an individual experience.
I remember being on a walk with a friend a few years ago who was at the sort of beginning stages of menopause and she was talking about how she didn't know what to expect, but had been in touch with friends who had been through it and she was the first person who said that there was like the potential for it to actually be a really positive experience, that the people that she knew on the other side had experienced, you know, a new sense of freedom or lightness, the ability to kind of move freely in their lives and do the things that felt good to them, that for some of them there was this feeling of like, you know, elderhood or wisdom that had come through and it was just really the first time I had ever heard of someone talking about it in a positive way.
And I know that in many other cultures where there's a wisdom deeper than ours, there are these ways of thinking about, you know, someone who goes through like a, you know, there's like the maiden / mother / crone, the triple goddess archetype way of seeing the world. And there are these, you know, many cultures that would honor this process as sacred, not simple or easy or sweet or, you know, horrible, but just as important because they're happening to us and that there is something important on the other side of it, rather than this sort of Western medicalized idea of it as being, like you said, this gross, weird thing, like, like your body's breaking down. You have no worth now that you can't produce offspring, like just these horrible constructions around it.
So I wanted to know if in your experience of interviews or in your relationships or in the process of writing this book, if you have seen other benefits and real treasures that can come through this experience, or sorry, if I'm making five questions into one, but I'm also curious, like, if there are ways that you've learned or have seen people relate to this experience that have sort of amplified or led to there being something beautiful inside of it.
Sasha: Yes to both. So one of the things that I heard in what you said is that it's basically - the friends that you were talking to who was saying, you know, I'm talking to these people and they're telling me that there is something really beautiful that comes out of this process and that definitely is something that's very, very real.
The experience of menopause is idiosyncratic. Everybody has a totally unique experience. So it's challenging to say, you know, we're, we are not great at nuance in Western culture. And so we want something to be terrible or amazing.
And, you know, it's like we either say this is going to be ruinous for you, or it's going to be incredibly empowering. And the reality is it's often a blend of both. So what I would say about the experience of the transition period itself - I think that part has challenges and the thing that I've seen in talking to women, the thing I've seen that makes the difference or makes that more or less manageable is a support system. And support system doesn't have to mean like an intricate network of a huge group of people. I think it can be a couple of people that you can speak with really openly or not speak with but do a nurture like, you know, an activity that kind of nourishes you.
It's basically ensuring that you feel accompanied during this transition, where things may catch you by surprise, you know. As things change for you, you know, you need to make accommodations for your body and your day to day life, which is honestly not something that most of us are used to doing most of the time. That's an incredible privilege, but that's you know, I think a common privilege.
So yes, the long and the short of it is I heard from many, many people once they are through their transition that they feel freer, that they feel more confident, they feel less concerned with what other people think of them.
And, you know, I've also heard from women who, you know, there's a significant amount of grief. Something has ended for them and that something can be fertility, that something can be a sense of drawing, you know, a particular kind of attention. It really depends on who you are and, you know, what your body does during this transition and how people around you respond to you.
You know, all those things make it really, I mean, I like to think of menopause is like it's an astronomical three body problem, right? Where you have three planets that all have a pull on each other. And so it becomes this impossible math problem to predict any one of their trajectories, because if any one of them moves, it shifts the other two.
And that's what menopause feels like to me. It's like your body, there's the cultural body, and then there's, you know, the political body. So all those things are tugging. For as much as I can, you know, offer, like you're a bunch of ways this could look, it's also so different for each person. So I hesitate to say "yes, it is decidedly positive" on net, because it's not for everybody. It is for a lot of people. And then it's also not. And that's norm. Both of them are normal, I guess, is the thing I want to be really clear about.
Megan: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for bringing in that complexity and even more complex if you add on, you know, gender identities and all the politics around sexual orientation and how people need to show up in the world and the freedom to be in our bodies in the ways that feel right for us.
So yeah, thank you for just naming the complicated nature of it and that that is normal and fine and okay. Yeah. I guess I was gonna shift into hearing more about where your creative threads are leading you now, but is there anything else you want to say about the book in this moment?
Sasha: I will say it comes out at the end of June. It's already available for pre order. I guess I might offer one other thing about it, which is what I want more than anything: I want clinicians to learn more and for there to be more research so we understand menopause better and we can support women better or people going through it better.
But I also very much don't want people to feel like it's something that they can get right or get wrong and really this book was written in the spirit of normalizing the range of experiences that can happen and encouraging people to not necessarily talk about it like everywhere and with everyone, but to find some people that they can talk to about it and get the support and like confidence they need to go through it in a way that is as positive as possible or as aligned with who they are as possible.
Megan: That's such a lovely intention.
Sasha: Yeah, thank you. And then as far as creativity now, I'm spending a bit of time now thinking about this book coming out and how to introduce people to it and let people know about it. But the other big thing is I found out about is book coaching. A friend of mine actually hired a book coach to help her with the book and introduced me to what it is. Anyone who has an idea to write a book or has written a book and now wants to try to get it published by someone or even self publish it. People may find it's very common experience to find that this is a less obvious process than it seems like it would be. Very similar, I think, to the way people get turned around in how to figure out what job to apply for and then how to go seek the opportunities they want.
So when I, when I first heard about book coaching, the thing I immediately felt was a sense of longing that I would have had someone to work with like this through my own book writing process. Because, you know, writing is writing, and I know it just seems like writing a book means writing more words, but it's not that.
Writing a book, you need to be able to create an experience for another person, so whether that's in fiction or non fiction, you're going to take someone on a journey. So you need to be able to map that out and then figure out how to best tell that narrative, but also how to invite someone into it and keep them there.
It is kind of lonely. And I, when I heard about book coaching, what I thought to myself was, "Dang, that would have been so much more efficient, but also probably so much more fun." If I had had a co conspirator, you know, if I'd had someone to kind of hash it out with instead of trying to figure all of that out on my own.
So, I am currently taking a course and learning more about how to be a book coach. My plan is to pursue getting certified by this organization and then potentially help other people bring their, you know, help them through the creative process, which sounds just like a, like, dream work to me. Yeah, that in addition to continuing to write, although I'm, I'm very much, you know, in that open exploratory space, I haven't felt pulled by another topic in a major way yet.
Megan: I feel like the book coaching step, not that it has to be, like, make any sense or be linear, but I feel like it's such a beautiful blend of where you've been. Like, there's a project management aspect, there's the creating an experience for someone through a, you know, a cheese or food or feeding them, there's the creative work itself, and you having been through that, there's, you know, even your intention with getting into human resources and really supporting and developing people, I feel like this is just a really beautiful blend of almost all of the things you have explored through your working life so far.
Does it feel that way to you or do you feel like it's sort of a less connected step?
Sasha: No, it totally feels that way. I mean, if I look back and think like what connects all these dots, right? What connects all the bags in my closet? All of it is the stuff that's really the most exciting to me and always draws me back in - is any opportunity to make myself and other people feel less alone.
I can see that in all the work that's been the most satisfying to me. And I'm just finding out about myself that I want to, I want to do things on my own, but not by myself. I almost always want a coach or a buddy. I really do so much better when I have that kind of companionship,
Megan: I love that you want to do things on your own, but not by yourself.
And like you mentioned from the people that you heard from who went through the transition of menopause, that accompaniment was so valuable and important, not telling you what to do at every step, but just being with and walking beside. That's so, I mean, I think just as like human beings, it's essential.
I'm really excited for you in this new role. I feel that just aura of supportiveness and permission to show up as we are in your presence. So I'm really excited for this next bag phase, whatever it is!
Sasha: It's gonna be a book bag, Megan! That's what it has to be.
Megan: Well I have pre-ordered my book. I am really excited to receive it. How can people connect with you and follow along?
Sasha: The two easiest ways right now are my website, which is really straightforward. It's SashaDavies. com and I am on Instagram @imperfectguides. The other place people can find me is on Substack, and that is called "I Text Myself."
I've broken, like, every rule that a marketing person would tell you to, like, name things the same. It's too much fun to come up with different names.
Megan: I love it. Well, I'll put all of these in the show notes, so it's very easy. Oh, this has been really nice. Is there anything else you want to share before we say goodbye?
Sasha: Yes. I want to say that, you know, one of the questions that you had sent to me was about, you know, How can I see that I have grown when I look at this trajectory and one of the things I'm realizing I have learned or it's a skill I feel like I am actively building, specifically with support from your work, is to really honor the fluctuation in my own pace.
And that's something that has been a real struggle and I just want to, I want to name that the work that you do has really, really helped me in that area. Yeah. So I'm going to say thanks.
Megan: Thank you. That means a lot to me, and this is work I'm doing too. So we're walking together into that. Thank you.
Okay, my friend, I hope that you loved that episode and I want to let you know that Sasha is open to fielding questions about writing and what that process has been like, so I encourage you to connect with her if you want to go deeper in that regard, with the concepts that we have covered here. I hope you will buy her book for yourself and a friend or a loved one.
I am wishing you an absolutely lovely shift into the midsummer period when the sun moves into the sign of Leo on July 22nd. I will be back with you in this form in about two weeks, and I hope you take such good care. I'll see you on the other side.
Ways to connect with Sasha:
subscribe to Substack I Text Myself
follow on Instagram @imperfectguides
learn more at sashadavies.com