About Me
I'm Savy and for eight years I waged war on my own body.
I didn't know that's what I was doing, I thought I was coping. Managing and pushing through the way I had always pushed through. The way twenty-four years as a nurse teaches you to push through, because there is always someone who needs you more than your need to stop.
But perimenopause doesn't respond to pushing. The harder I fought, the worse it got. The more I resisted, the more it cost me. I was standing on a knife edge waving my sword at my own symptoms and my own body, and I was losing.
Then came the insight that changed everything. I found information that confirmed my instincts. This was not a breakdown or a malfunction. It was not something to be fixed, managed, or survived. It was a crossing—with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A rite of passage that every culture before ours had always recognised, held with ceremony, and guided women through with wisdom and community. The moment I understood that, everything shifted. I was not lost. I was in the middle of something that had a shape, a map, and an exit.
I put the sword down and found that when I stopped fighting and began to honour what was happening instead, my resistance dropped, and so did many of my symptoms. The peace I had been fighting toward was available the moment I stopped fighting for it.
What I had lived through needed a name. I felt drawn to understand what had been missing from my own crossing—the container, the guidance, the acknowledgement that this transition was something significant rather than something shameful. That search led me to the works of van Gennep, Turner, Jung, Murdock, Singer, and others who had spent their lives studying exactly this territory. What I found confirmed what my body had already known. From that foundation I built a methodology. One that gives the crossing the shape, the depth, and the ceremony it was always supposed to have.
I had been adrift for years—floating without anchor, direction, or any sense of where I was going or who I was becoming. The methodology gave me an anchor. And once I was anchored, I could finally set a new course. Not back to who I was before but forward to who I had been crossing toward all along.
That woman—the one who knows who she is, who has earned her authority, and leads from wisdom rather than effort—is the Matriarch. I know her now. And I know the crossing that leads to her.
I left nursing because the work was taking more than I could give. Twenty-four years of being drained by hospital politics had left me without the resources to care for myself through the hardest transition of my life. But leaving gave me something nursing never could—the space and the freedom to turn everything I had lived through into something I could give back.
I am not a clinician offering symptom management. I am a woman who crossed without a map and came back knowing the terrain. I am the guide I needed and did not have.
If you are exhausted from fighting — if you are standing on your own knife edge wondering why nothing is working — I am here to tell you that this is a crossing. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And when it is held correctly, it leads somewhere extraordinary.
I'm Savy, The Menopause Matriarch,
and I'm here to guide you through.
