Why I Stopped Asking What Was Wrong With Me, and What I Asked Instead

Written by Julie Zdravkovski, Spiritual Advisor & Medium

Julie Zdravkovski is a spiritual advisor and thought leader redefining how we engage with intuition, transformation, and personal power. Known for her direct, no-bypass approach, she challenges spiritual narratives and guides people back to grounded, embodied truth.

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I want to start by saying that this piece is not a prescription, a recommendation, or a comparison. Every woman's journey through perimenopause and menopause is her own. If hormone replacement therapy has been life-changing for you, or if you have found relief through a path that looks nothing like mine, that is exactly as it should be.

What I want to offer here is simply a different perspective. For a long time, the dominant conversation around this stage of life has been shaped by one particular narrative. I have quietly walked a different one, and enough women have asked me to share it that I think there is value in laying it out honestly.

I began perimenopause when I was thirty-six, long before this stage of life was being widely spoken about the way it is today. I am now approaching forty-eight, and by August this year, it will have been two years since I entered postmenopause. This means I moved through the entire transition earlier than is often considered typical.

When I look back on it now, what I see most clearly is not the symptoms, the phases, or the medical timeline of it all. What I see is the question I chose to ask my body during those years and the question I quietly refused to ask.

I did not ask what was wrong with me. I asked what my nervous system needed. That single reframe changed everything about how I moved through this season of my life.

The question that shapes everything else

When perimenopause began at thirty-six, I did not know that was what was happening. What I knew was that my sleep was disrupted, I was having night sweats, and my body was quietly signalling that something in me was shifting.

My grandmother on my mum's side went through menopause early. Since I began speaking about my own experience, other women in my family have shared that they did too. There is likely a family pattern there, although I would not put it all down to genetics alone.

I could have interpreted every one of those signals through the lens of “What is wrong with me?” and traced everything back to the hormonal changes I now know were underway. But that was not the question that arrived for me.

What arrived instead was a much quieter one: What does my body actually need right now to feel supported? Once that question became my anchor, the way I lived, moved, ate, worked, and thought began to organise itself around the answer.

I look back now and recognise that this was the beginning of a decade-long practice of listening to my body rather than diagnosing it. I still went to doctors. I still had my blood tests checked every year. I still took my concerns seriously.

But my primary orientation was not towards figuring out what was going wrong. It was towards figuring out what was going to help me feel well. Over ten years, the difference between those two orientations produced a very different experience of this life stage from the one I have heard many other women describe.

Purpose as its own kind of medicine

There is something I noticed only in hindsight: Both transitions in my hormonal life have coincided almost exactly with major periods of creative and professional growth in my work.

When I entered perimenopause at thirty-six, I was leaving my corporate career and going all in on my spiritual business for the first time. I had had an Australian Business Number (ABN) since 2004 and had done phone line readings, in-person work, and work at a crystal shop.

Around age thirty-six, I decided this was going to be a profession for me. While I was building the business, I worked four or five different jobs at once so I could still put food on the table, pay the mortgage, and cover the bills. I was completely immersed in what I was creating.

A decade later, as I moved into menopause, the pattern repeated almost identically. I found myself in another creative surge, another elevation of my brand, another refinement of my offerings, and another wave of building the next chapter of my business.

Ideas were arriving one after another. New classes were coming through. My teaching was deepening. I studied healing modalities, sacred geometry, remote viewing, trance work, and cosmic intelligence. I also built programs, circles, and offerings that my students are loving now and that I am genuinely proud of.

I have come to see that this was not a coincidence. Purpose and creation became their own kind of medicine during both of those seasons.

When you are actively building something meaningful and your energy is being channelled into something that matters to you, the hormonal transition happening in the background becomes one part of a much larger story about what is being asked of you, rather than the entire story.

I am not suggesting that everyone who enters this stage of life needs to build a business. What I am suggesting is that having something that lights you up, pulls you forward, and gives your creative, intellectual, and spiritual energy somewhere to move changes the entire quality of how this transition lands in your body.

It gives you a reason to keep showing up. It gives you a reason to look after yourself. It gives your soul a channel through which the aliveness that is still very much yours can continue to move.

Spirituality as an anchor, not an escape

Throughout both transitions, my spiritual practice was the ground I stood on. It was not because it made the physical experience easier, but because it kept me connected to myself rather than allowing me to become consumed by fear or uncertainty about what was happening in my body.

I meditated. I worked with mentors. I studied deeply. I explored somatic practices, archetypal work, women's circles, and tantric meditation.

I do want to name that this kind of tantric practice is not what most people assume it to be. It is about working with the energy of the body to regulate the nervous system and manifest what you are here to create.

I moved through years of my own inner exploration during that time, including a relationship that started well and slowly became toxic, as well as the long, contained years of Melbourne's lockdowns. All of it deepened my relationship with myself in ways I could not have anticipated.

The reason I mention all of that is that when a woman is going through this life stage, her nervous system can feel especially sensitive, and the hormonal shift can place it under significant pressure.

The work I had already done to build a strong internal foundation meant that when the physical symptoms did arrive, my baseline was already grounded. I was not fragile going into perimenopause. I was not lost in menopause.

My spirituality was not somewhere I went to escape what was happening. It was where I stayed connected to who I was underneath what was happening, which is a completely different relationship with the practice.

I want to be clear that you do not need to be spiritual for this to be true. Whatever anchors you to yourself, whether that is creativity, nature, relationships, prayer, movement, art, or purpose, is what will hold you through this stage.

What matters is that you have something, somewhere you can return to that reminds you who you are underneath the changes, so the changes never become bigger than you.

Consistency over chasing

One of the biggest lessons I took from this entire journey is that consistency is worth more than novelty. I did not chase every new trend, every miracle protocol, or every latest thing someone told me I had to try.

I stayed with the foundations I knew worked for me. I cycled things in and out based on what my body intuitively told me, rather than on what an algorithm recommended that month.

Movement became a foundation I stayed committed to. I started weight training at home during my menopause years. I built up gradually with a couple of dumbbells and short sessions of half an hour, three to five days a week, depending on my energy.

I have not missed a training week in almost two years. That kind of consistency is what my body responded to, far more than any dramatic intervention.

I would honestly say that I am now in the strongest and most defined shape of my life, more so than in my twenties or thirties, even though I have trained on and off my whole life. Something about consistent, functional strength work, at a pace my body could integrate, changed everything.

Nutrition was equally steady. I focused on eating in a way that supported my body rather than following restrictive trends.

My core supplements remained simple and consistent: a high-quality plant-based protein, creatine, vitamin D, and omega-3s. I cycled in other things for a few months at a time when they felt supportive, including medicinal mushrooms, nootropic greens, and similar supplements. I then paused before returning to my basics.

The pattern was always the same. I stayed with what worked, cycled intentionally, and let my body tell me when something new was actually needed.

I share this not as a template, but as an illustration of the principle beneath it. The boring, unglamorous foundations are what work. A life supported by consistent, honest care is far more powerful than one that keeps chasing the next thing.

Trusting what you already know

One of the most important moments in my whole journey came when I finally went to a doctor and said plainly, “I think I am in menopause.”

More than once, I was told that I was too young, that it was probably stress, that I was probably fine, and that it was probably nothing.

Interestingly, it was almost always the female general practitioners (GPs) who dismissed me, which was not what I expected. The male doctors tended to take me seriously.

I want to say this clearly because I hear this story from so many other women: You know the patterns and changes in your body better than anyone else does.

When you sense that something is happening, that sensing is information worth bringing to a qualified health professional. It may not always be right in the specifics, but it can be valuable in pointing towards a concern that deserves attention.

There was also a moment early on when a doctor's immediate suggestion was to refer me to a gynaecologist to discuss HRT. That was not the path I wanted to take at the time.

It may be right for someone else. I have friends and family members for whom it has been life-changing, and I am not against it in any way.

But I am someone who has always been sensitive to medications. I had done my own research and believed that progesterone support might be more appropriate for me, which is what I asked to discuss.

That was a moment when I had to advocate for myself calmly, with information, and ask to be heard. I want to name it because I know how many women are told what they need before anyone actually asks them what they know about themselves.

I eventually went to a different doctor, someone who took me seriously, ran the tests I needed, and confirmed what I had been intuitively feeling for months.

My uterine lining was thin. My oestrogen levels were where they would be expected to be for someone in postmenopause. The results aligned with what my body had already been telling me.

At the end of that appointment, he said that the tests were confirming what I already knew. He told me that unless something changed, I should keep doing exactly what I had been doing because it was clearly working for me.

That consultation felt different because he gave me control. He laid out the options. He respected what I had already learned about myself.

He did not push anything on me. He did not dismiss what I was feeling, and he did not need me to fit a particular narrative before he was willing to acknowledge what was happening in my body.

I want to name that experience because too many women are quietly dismissed at exactly the moment they need to be heard. If that is where you are right now, please know that the answer is not to stop trusting your knowing. The answer is to find a qualified health professional who will listen to you.

The scare that sharpened my listening

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, in August 2024, I had a breast cancer scare. It was actually the second one I had experienced.

Everything turned out to be completely fine, but going through the ultrasounds, biopsies, mammograms, and contrast dye still messes with your head, no matter how connected you feel to your body.

There were moments when I sat with the possibility that it might not be fine. I had to genuinely consider what my treatment options would be, what I would be willing to do, and how I would move forward.

I share this because that experience, more than any other single event, sharpened my listening. It made me realise that being deeply in tune with my body is not a substitute for having things checked. Both matter. Trust what you feel, and also get the tests done.

Shortly after that scare, my periods stopped completely. I later understood that this had been my final menstrual period and that I was moving towards postmenopause. My intuition about what was happening in my body only became more precise from that point on.

The people around you matter more than you think

The other thing I want to name, because I think it is often left out of these conversations, is that the people around you during this stage of life matter enormously.

I was surrounded by family and close friends who lit me up, grounded me, made me laugh, were real with me, and never once treated me as though something was wrong with me because of the way my body was changing. That kind of support is not incidental. It is foundational.

You are deeply influenced by the people around you. When those closest to you are steady, present, warm, and encouraging, you carry some of that steadiness into your own body.

My mother is also part of this. She has always had an unshakeable constitution, hardly ever gets sick, and refuses to identify as unwell unless she genuinely has to.

She would never put it in these words, but her attitude has always been that mindset affects how she experiences illness. She has little patience for identifying with being unwell.

She knows when to stop and take care of herself, but her baseline is always mindset first. I grew up around that, and I am sure some of what I have carried through this transition may have come from her, both biologically and through the way she moves through her own body.

If you are moving through this transition and the people around you are making you feel smaller, sicker, more fragile, or more limited than you are, that is worth paying attention to.

The company you keep during this season shapes what you believe is possible for yourself on the other side of it.

What this season actually asks of you

When I look back at these ten years, what I understand now is that perimenopause and menopause did not ask me to fix anything. They asked me to listen.

They asked me to soften my relationship with control. They asked me to trust the intelligence of my own body, the wisdom of my own intuition, and the guidance of my own spirit.

They also asked me to build a life around what was actually supporting me, rather than what I thought I should be doing. This season is not the ending of anything. It is a doorway into another chapter.

The chapter on the other side can be more grounded, more creative, more embodied, more purposeful, and more your own than any that came before it.

But that only becomes true when you stop treating this stage of life as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a season that is asking you to come home to yourself in a deeper way than you ever have before.

What you already know

You already know what has been supporting you and what has been depleting you. You already know which relationships light you up and which ones are draining what little energy you have.

You already know whether you are moving through this season with something to build, something to trust, and something to return to, or whether you are trying to push through it without any real support underneath you.

Whatever your body has been telling you, however quietly, is worth listening to. It is worth listening to, however inconvenient, uncomfortable, or disruptive it may be to the version of your life you have been trying to keep going without adjustment.

You do not need to know exactly what to do. You only need to ask a different question. Not, “What is wrong with me?” but, “What do I actually need right now to feel supported?”

Once that becomes your anchor, the rest of it will begin to organise itself around the answer.

A note from me, and an invitation

If something in this piece raised a question you have been carrying about your own body, your own knowing, your own transition, or the version of yourself you are becoming through it, send it to me.

Each month, I choose questions from readers and channel a response in this column. You will not be named. You will simply be heard, and through you, others sitting with the same thing will be heard too. Send your question here.

If, at some point, you want to work with me more directly, you can find ways to do so here. Spiritual advisory sessions, classes, books, and more are available when you are ready, not before.

I am Julie. I am a medium. And I am genuinely interested in what you already know but have not yet trusted.

Follow me on Instagram for more info!

Read more from Julie Zdravkovski

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Julie Zdravkovski, Spiritual Advisor & Medium

Julie Zdravkovski is an international spiritual advisor, teacher, and thought leader known for challenging the norms of the spiritual and self-development space. With over 30 years of experience, she cuts through surface-level spirituality to deliver grounded, direct insight that prioritizes truth over comfort. Beginning as a child medium, Julie has spent decades refining her intuitive abilities while also building a corporate career in leadership and human behavior. This dual lens allowed her to bridge spirituality with real-world application in a way that is both practical and transformative, which propelled her in building a professional spiritually-led business, Modern Day Medium.