By Sarah E. Murphy

It’s May, and another performative month is nearing an end. Mental Health “Awareness.”

Even the name is lame.

We need more than patronizing awareness in this country; we need action, empathy, support, and resources that are affordable, accessible, and stigma-free. The same goes for menopausal care and women’s health, but America fails us in countless ways, all by design.

Women who are immobilized are powerless. They can’t challenge the system.

I’ve been writing and speaking for the past six years about the connection between bodily autonomy and mental health based upon my own experience with abortion and suddenly, I find myself a prisoner in my own body once again. I’ve been navigating a nonsensical path in an endlessly futile attempt to manage menopausal symptoms, both physical and mental, which reached an entirely different level in August 2025, as my mother was declining from dementia.

In my case, the condition is  exacerbated by a lifelong chronic pain issue I was recently diagnosed with at age 54. 

I am grateful to have found a compassionate gynecologist who listens. She didn’t learn about the condition until 2022, the year after I first suffered a reaction that lasted at least two months, as I went in circles attempting to address the symptoms, not the cause. That’s how little we know about women’s health.

Discovering this about my body has been profoudly validating, for it was a major factor in the difficult decision to not have children.

Women are historically expected to endure more pain than men, another construct of a patriachal society, and there’s even a stigma against those of us who share our reality in menopause, demanding and expecting relief. Instead, we’re supposed to “push through.” Or, as my former religion would instruct, “Offer it up for the Souls in Purgatory.”

Fuck that shit.

At the same time I was having health challenges in August, my husband Chris began experiencing difficulty swallowing, and our simple little life hasn’t been the same since.

I lost my mother in October, and seven days after we celebrated her legacy at the Congregational Church in Falmouth,  Chris and I were in the ER at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Since then, I’ve watched the seasons pass through hospital and car windows as life goes on around us. My career and passions have been on hold: writing, photography, social justice activism, solo travel. It’s almost impossible to write about other people when you’re suffering. I haven’t been on a plane since 2023 because I didn’t want to get that text when I was thousands of miles away. Instead, I planned to return to my sacred spots in Italy after my mother’s passing as a way to process my grief, but to paraphrase John Lennon, life happened. Plans on  hold.

My lifelong insomnia has also been magnified with nothing offering relief. I’m up at night worrying about money and the future, fears that have always found me now in overdrive, worries some people will never know. By day, my once charming and peaceful Falmouth Harbor neighborhood is a construction zone for a giant, ugly trophy house. I finally opted for an anti-depressant as a last resort for sleep, but I hated the way it made me feel for many reasons.

The inability to do any of the things I love is the cause of my depression, and my reality feels like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman I studied as an English major.

“Who will take care of you when you’re old?“ One of the profoundly ignorant questions posed to women who don’t have children is already plaguing me in my mid-fifties. I’m envious of women like my mother-in-law, who  had a spouse with the same type of cancer, at a less advanced stage, and also had three grown children to help her in any way possible. She wasn’t alone.

When you’re crying in the shower so your husband doesn’t hear you, or in the car, so you don’t break down in front of the pharmacist, that’s when you can’t help but wonder: What if our journey had been different?

How nice it would be to say, “Hey, can you go pick up your dad’s medication?”

There have been countless times I’ve imagined what it feels like to receive a hug from a child when you need it most.

Last Thursday, after heading to Dana-Farber for the second time that week for what we thought would be a routine visit, Chris’s oxygen levels were dangerously low and his PA told us to go straight to Falmouth ER. Another highway drive with aggressive, distracted drivers only caring about their destination while endangering everyone else. First World Problems everywhere.

Later that night, as Chris was admitted with pneumonia, I saw cheerful photos on social media of the summer launch party of the magazine I write for, wishing I could be at the Captain Kidd with the rest of the team to celebrate my own contributions. Instead, Chris and I cried as I kissed him goodbye and I headed home to feed the cat. I stopped at CVS to pick up an adjusted dose of my medication, praying to my parents it would help me sleep. The neon lights burned my bloodshot eyes, and I was so tired, I could barely read the screen informing me there was nothing waiting for me.

“Yeah, we don’t have that,” the young woman said in her signature dismissive tone. “Why don’t you just try something else?”

I left the store holding back tears.