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Particular Things / a perimenopause deck
Fifty letters came in. The card carries the short version. This is the long one, with the answer that would not fit.
Fifty women wrote in. The deck carries a short version of each letter and a short version of each answer, because a card is 105 by 148 millimetres and a page is not. This is the long version.
Every card takes the same position: the state has information in it. The rage is accurate about its target. The fog is a real report on real depletion. The sound sensitivity is a threshold that was always there and was being overridden.
Pull one on Sunday. Leave it out where you can see it. Do the move.
The deck is fifty women. You will not recognise yourself in all of them, and reading someone else's letter is not a miss. Nobody read the problem page only for the letters that were theirs.
Most of these will not be yours. A few will be so exact it is unsettling. A card is allowed to be wrong.
These cards are not medical advice and they are not a diagnosis. What they are is language, so that when you get to the appointment you can say what is happening instead of saying you feel a bit off.
If you have been told it is stress, or your age, or that you seem fine, that is not the end of it. That is one doctor. Keep going. The right one is out there and she exists in reasonable numbers now, which was not true ten years ago. Take a written list. Take a card if it helps. Ask directly about perimenopause and ask what they are ruling out.
You are not making this up and you are not too much.
Every card carries a track at the foot, title and artist only, 1975 to 1995 with the weight in the eighties. Australian artists run through it on purpose.
Deck track, not attached to any card: Alanis Morissette, Hand In My Pocket. It opens the playlist, because the chorus turns on the word the deck is named after.
Rather than fifty strangers, ten women, each writing in five times across the deck. Same names, same faces, a different letter each time. It is how a problem page actually works.