Perimenopause symptoms are showing up for women in their 30s, and a viral Threads post just gave thousands of them permission to laugh about it.
On Oct. 11, Threads user @prissygirl80 told her “perimenopause ladies” that she had spent about six minutes looking for her keys, which were in her hand the whole time. “It’s advancing ain’t it?” she asked. The post has pulled about 15,700 likes, 2,400 replies and 190,000 views, all from an account with fewer than 2,500 followers. Women flooded the replies with confessions of their own.
View on Threads
The most common story was searching for a phone while talking on it. At least six women admitted to it, including one who cried to a friend about the missing phone in the middle of the call. Another told her man she had to hang up so she could call her provider and track it down.
Then came the women hunting for things they were already wearing. Glasses on the face and glasses on the head came up over and over. One woman panicked for 10 minutes over an engagement ring that was on her finger. Another searched for her favorite wig while it sat on her head. One found her AirPods at the end of the day when they flew out of her bra.
Words went missing too. One woman called the refrigerator “the garage,” explaining that it’s “where we park food,” then cried when the real word refused to come back. Others described losing their train of thought in the middle of a sentence at work.
The misplacements got creative. A TV remote turned up in the freezer. A coffee pot surfaced on the tequila bar after a 20 minute search. One woman lost her car in the lot at work and had her husband drive her around while she wondered whether she had even driven that day. Another went out for bread and came home with a full bag of groceries and no bread.
The workarounds for perimenopause symptoms are their own genre. Women swore by tracker keychains, AirTags on everything, notepads left as clues for themselves, and shouting “Hey Siri, where are you?” across the house.
The jokes land because the brain fog is real, and research shows it is arriving earlier than most women expect. A study published in npj Women’s Health in February 2025, conducted by researchers at UVA Health and the period tracking app Flo, surveyed about 4,400 women. It found that 55.4% of women ages 30 to 35 reported moderate to severe symptoms associated with perimenopause, the transition years before menopause when hormone levels start to swing. Among women 36 to 40, the number rose to 64.3%, yet only 8% of that group had seen a doctor about perimenopause. Most women in the study did not seek help until their 50s.
Not every doctor reads the study the same way. Dr. Gillian Goddard, writing for ParentData, cautioned that it does not prove perimenopause is causing those symptoms in younger women, and that labeling them perimenopause too quickly could keep other conditions from being caught. What the numbers do show is that a lot of women in their 30s are living with perimenopause symptoms and not getting answers.
For Black women, the timeline can start sooner. The Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, a long running national study that has followed more than 3,000 women through midlife since 1996, found that Black women reach menopause about 8.5 months earlier than white women on average. Black women in the study also dealt with hot flashes and night sweats for a median of about 10 years, compared with 6.5 years for white women, and were less likely to receive hormone therapy.
The thread reflects that. Women described perimenopause symptoms well beyond forgetfulness, calling hot flashes “sweating from the inside out” and naming itchy ears as the symptom nobody warns you about. One woman said she had been dealing with it for almost nine years. Another said she had been thinking about getting checked for early dementia before realizing it was perimenopause.
A woman who is 57 and in full menopause used her reply to urge younger women to educate themselves and speak up at the doctor’s office, saying doctors gaslight women. Her reasons: menopause gets little attention in medical school, most of the research was done by men, and women’s health research gets pushed to the back of the line. Hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, ran through the replies as a side conversation, with women comparing notes on hormone therapy and pellets and reporting mixed results.
The replies were full of “I feel seen” and “you are not alone,” and one woman called the whole thread therapeutic. Husbands, mothers, and daughters showed up in the stories as witnesses to the lost keys and missing words. And the women further along kept telling the newer ones the same thing: you come out on the other side.
