In our latest practice research post, Arlene Jackson creates reflective cyanotype prints, hoping the sun’s rays will transform a body dehumanised by sexist medical disbelief into ‘something extraordinary’.
One of the challenging aspects of living with the chronic neurological illness Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), as I do, is the process of distinguishing new symptoms from old. In my late forties, the familiarity of my ME bodily experience of night sweats, cognitive impairment, heart palpitations, muscular aches and pains, fatigue, and sleep disturbance, led me to overlook the fact that these symptoms are also classic signs of perimenopause. However, by my early fifties, the intensity of these symptoms had not only escalated, but also encompassed anxiety, which was undeniably new for me.
In the summer of 2025, after a second unsuccessful attempt at HRT, and as I emerged from an ME relapse while focusing on getting my PhD thesis over the line, I needed respite. I brought together the accessible escapism offered by my garden with cyanotype printmaking. This process enabled a level of mindfulness, which quietened my anxiety and allowed reflection on the impact of another significant change to my body. The following three prints and accompanying texts offer an indelible insight into my experience of living with the physical and psychological symptoms of menopause, while continuing to cope with long-term ME symptoms and the contestation of the condition by the medical world.
1. ‘Mrs Average of the UK’
After a male GP sped through a perimenopause checklist and found I ticked all the necessary boxes, he stated: “So – you are Mrs Average of the UK.” This dehumanising comment did not leave me speechless – I was used to the casual offences of doctors – but still, I caught my breath.
Later, in the bath, I assessed my new pink curves and folds, speckled with constellations of cherry angioma. My thighs, patterned with oval outlines and patches of mauve and beige, offered faded imprints of decades-old sun damage, which evidenced holidays abroad when that was something I could do. As I moved a bar of soap across my hip, I felt comforted by the soft tissue, because I remembered – it is impossible to forget – a past contusion on the hip, when the bone had become a blade during a years-long relapse. As I lay back against the edge of the bath, I caught sight of a snail’s trail of white scar tissue above my pubic bone, evidence of the saving of my child through an emergency C-Section.
Months later, I find my place in the sun and think of this body, which a GP reduced to a shrinking uterus and depleted ovarian tissue, assessing it, and me, as nothing more than a national average. I lay tender flowers and soft grasses on a piece of cyanotype paper and reform my uterus. I hope that the sun’s rays will cast this collage into something more than average, perhaps sear it into something extraordinary. As I wait for the image to develop, I think about how often after an interaction with a medical professional, I am left to rebuild myself from the inside out.
2. ‘The Dark Side of the Moon Cycle’
My usually sunny disposition is regularly eclipsed. I wake in the early hours with a sense of existential dread, so upsetting that tears soften the crusted corners of sleep in my eyes. And yet, this apocalyptic feeling has become so routine that I see it, name it, and soothe myself back to sleep by repeating an internal mantra that it will pass. I visualise a corona of hope that edges out of the blackness and signifies that a whole world of light is waiting to be revealed. But still the waves of change come. I am repeatedly fuelled by fire. A rocket-fuel intense heat that sets my skin aflame. My body reacts by triggering its own sprinkler system, and cold sweat rushes from every pore. But it is not enough. Someone told me once of a woman who was seen out in the cold with a cloud of visible steam rising from the top of her head. Queen, I think – wearing a crown of hormonal chaos as she goes about her daily business. I imagine that steam as thoughts evaporating into the ether and the heat as rage.
My menopausal rage is as immediate and unprovoked as the internal heat. It launches me into a universe of personal dissonance. I am someone who usually doesn’t swear, who only heard that from drunk men when they were younger, and therefore associates it with aggression. Yet, in my head, I scream the worst of obscenities. Explosions of dark matter, which feel dangerous, lethal even, especially from a woman. So, I bite my tongue. But still, a couple of profanities have slipped out during important meetings, and my eyes have flashed towards my headshot captured on a shared screen, as I try to recognise this woman who I no longer identify with. This woman who looks up at the night sky and hopes for a meteor strike to bring on the next Ice Age. Something to cool her down by any means necessary. Have her square up to a dinosaur. She will take it on. Yes, she may forget what she marked in red clay on the wall of the cave, and cry because the fire looks particularly beautiful as it flickers in the unpolluted darkness. But she will tear at that dinosaur until its bones bear the scars of her rage. Other women will notice these marks and smile as they weave children through a museum, where the dinosaur skeletons are built up to the second floor and protected behind man-made glass.
3. ‘Confetti Head’
If I imagine my brain, I picture it as pink. A pale, baby pink, like the petals of the cherry blossom tree which stands outside my bedroom window. Through the long winter, I long to witness new growth on its branches. No sooner does the tree come into bloom in spring than the delicate petals are blown away, mirroring my thoughts and ideas, my wishing for words and fishing for phrases, which have become as fragile as confetti in the rain.
Years of living with ME have taught me to be open about my cognitive issues, to say out loud in the space of an unfinished sentence that I don’t have my words at the moment. This new experience of menopausal memory impairment remains frightening; I am made to think of my brain as not blossoming pink, but clinical grey. Grey matter, which is shrinking, shedding tissue and cells. Zühlsdorff et al. (2025) analysed the grey matter of a cohort of female participants from the UK Biobank to assess potential associations between menopause, HRT use, and experiences of poor mental health and cognition. This tissue is located in the regions of the brain associated with emotion and memory, also known to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, which disproportionately affects women (Mervosh and Devi 2025). This led researchers to move beyond previous hypotheses, which implicated female longevity in this context (Vila-Castelar et al. 2023), and attend to the intersections of sex, gender and dementia.
This scholarly recognition of the severity of menopause-related cognitive impairment is helpful to me – it explains my need to harness concentration in order to concentrate. It rationalises what feels like an emotional effort to mechanically connect one neurone to another in that black void of grey, which matters more and more to me as the work of remembering is made present in my consciousness. The idea of saving these cells, of pollinating them with synthetic hormones and sowing seeds of pink, is appealing. As if to manifest this into being, I gather the fallen petals from my cherry blossom tree and let them fall for a second time onto paper I have painted and prepared. I cut out a figure: a female in side profile, with her hair blowing to emphasise the sense of speed with which my thoughts dissipate. I am reassured by the permanence of my efforts. This memory forged in print will sustain me as I look ahead and mark one season of change after another, until the one which brings the cherry blossom into bloom comes around again.
About the author
Arlene Jackson is a postdoctoral researcher in the fields of the medical humanities, literary and cultural disability studies, philosophy and feminist theory. Her practice spans creative writing, critical commentary, photography, and cyanotype, to explore her own disabled/chronically ill experience and to offer wider representations of chronic illness/disability. Her PhD thesis centred a critical-creative exploration of lived experiences of ME and Long Covid based on a collaborative audiobook listening practice. Arlene’s recent publications and contact details are on her website
About In Practice
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
References
Mervosh, N., and G. Devi. 2025. ‘Estrogen, menopause, and Alzheimer’s disease: understanding the link to cognitive decline in women.’ Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, 12: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2025.1634302.
Vila-Castelar, C., C. Udeh-Momoh, N. T. Aggarwal and M. M. Mielke. 2023. ‘Sex and gender considerations in dementia: a call for global research.’ Nature Aging 3(5):463-465. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-023-00374-5.
Zuhlsdorff, K., C. Langley and R. Bethlehem et al. 2026. ‘Emotional and cognitive effects of menopause and hormone replacement therapy.’ Psychological Medicine 56: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291725102845.
