You are forty-nine years old, standing in your shower at 6:47 AM, shampoo bottle in hand, and you have absolutely no idea what to do next.
Not in a philosophical way. In a physical, actual, my-brain-has-completely-blanked way. You are convinced you have early-onset dementia.
What you actually have is perimenopause meeting undiagnosed ADHD at full speed.
Shifting Ground is the fourth book in The Jigsaw Mind Series - a raw, honest memoir about the collision nobody warned you about. The one where your hormones strip away the coping strategies that kept you functional for decades, and suddenly the ADHD you never knew you had is impossible to ignore.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Melanie du Preez was fifty years old, twenty-three years into practice at Parkmed, when perimenopause unmasked her undiagnosed ADHD. She had been diagnosing it in other people for her entire career. She had never once suspected it in herself.
This book is about what happened next. The itching that kept her awake at 4:30 AM. The word-finding failures that happened mid-sentence with patients. The guard she chewed up in her sleep. The headaches that moved in for weeks. The medical system that kept missing the intersection of two conditions it barely acknowledged in women.
It is also about the slow, imperfect process of building a life around what is actually true - not what should be true, not what worked before, not what the productivity books promise. What is true for a brain and body that have changed, permanently, and are not going back.
This is not a recovery story. Some of what Melanie describes is still happening. Still difficult. Still far from solved. But it is an honest story. And honest, it turns out, is more useful than inspiring.
For women over 40 whose ADHD symptoms have suddenly got worse. For women who have been told it is just stress, just anxiety, just getting older. For women who are lying awake at 4:30 AM googling 'why is perimenopause making my brain worse' and finding only yoga suggestions.
You are not imagining this. You are not going crazy. You are losing your oestrogen. And your oestrogen, it turns out, was holding together pieces you never knew were scattered.
Welcome to shifting ground.
