Thread by @monaeltahawy

My #perimenopause has mostly had two settings
- beat someone up
- have a breakdown
Which is why I love the film Everything Everywhere All at Once so much: Evelyn beats many people up and has a breakdown of sorts. It is the perfect menopause allegory. #MenopauseAwarenessMonth

https://twitter.com/monaeltahawy/status/1576237775547813889

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the perfect menopause allegory film.

I don’t care if that’s not what The Daniels had in mind when they wrote and directed it. It’s art. It’s out there. And my menopause claims it! feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-me… #MenopauseAwarenessMonth

And I don’t know if Michelle Yeoh has ever talked about her #menopause transition. I don’t care, I love her. She’s 4yrs older than me so I’m claiming her too. It is enough for me that Evelyn gets to beat people up AND have a breakdown of sorts because fuck, yes please!

That is the essence of my perimenopause on any given day.

Evelyn is a woman who knows only what the world allows her to be and who has no time or privilege to know that she could have been something else. And then bang–’verse jumping!
#MenopauseAwarenessMonth

”’verse jump” in the film’s vernacular is to jump between universes––to accumulate skills from the alternative lives all the other Evelyns are living to save the multiverse from a “great evil.”

I see that bang--'verse jumping--as perimenopause. #MenopauseAwarenessMonth

The multiverse might not need us to save it, but our internal multiverse needs us to have a similar reckoning, to stand in the power of a self that has made it through the #perimenopause and everything it threw at us, and to emerge as our own superheroes.

feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-me…

As she “‘verse jumps,” Evelyn is the perfect avatar for us folk on our menopause transition, being wrenched from one “what if” to another.

Once Evelyn gets a taste of options–What If’s–available to her alter egos in other universes, we understand why women are denied a 3D life.

Why their imagination is flattened out of daring to want more.

Because we would want more, we would want different, and how would our universe handle that, huh?!

Every time Evelyn sees her alternates and then beats the fuck out of someone in our universe, I feel vindicated.

I know she’s doing it to save the multiverse from evil, but who wouldn’t want to beat the fuck out of everyone for all the lost opportunities and regrets that women are socialized into thinking are life?

feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-me… #MenopauseAwarenessMonth

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feministgiant.com #MenopauseAwarenessMonth