Nobody told me menopause would be the hardest part of “after”

I spent years as an award-winning producer working across film, TV, branded content, and digital. The kind of career where you’re constantly creating, constantly moving between projects and platforms. Most recently, I was at a major health and wellness publication working in the chronic condition space, creating content for people navigating life with ongoing health challenges.

Which is almost painfully ironic now, because I had no idea I was about to become one of them.

Lost my job unexpectedly. Then came the breast cancer diagnosis.

Suddenly all that time I’d spent creating health content? It gave me this sharp, uncomfortable perspective on what people actually need when they’re living with chronic conditions. Not the polished wellness narratives or corporate healthcare speak—just real tools that actually work.

I was forty-one when treatment threw me into medical menopause. No gradual transition, no warning—just overnight, done. And when I went looking for help, for anything built specifically for early or medically-induced menopause? Nothing existed. Everything out there was designed for women in their fifties going through it naturally. None of it spoke to what we’re dealing with: the velocity of it all, the grief nobody warns you about, the weird overlap of “oh right, I’m also still recovering from cancer.”

So I built it myself.

PauseKit exists because I needed it to exist and it didn’t. The whole thing came out of those 3am wake-ups soaked in sweat, Googling desperately and finding nothing useful. I knew from my years making health content what good resources should look like. They just didn’t exist for us yet.

I’m not a corporation with a team and venture funding. Just a survivor who spent years creating content for people with chronic conditions, then became one herself, and built what I wished existed when I was sitting up at 3am feeling completely alone.