By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated April 6, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… I turn 39 this year, and it feels like out of nowhere perimenopause has officially entered my friend group chat.
Not as something we’re experiencing yet, necessarily, but as this looming thing we’re suddenly bracing for. So getting on the phone with Misty Copeland, who is just a few years older at 43, and hearing her say she hadn’t really been having these conversations either, honestly released some of the panic I didn’t even realize I’d been holding.
Copeland recently partnered with Thorne, the scientific wellness company, around the launch of their newest product, Perimenopause Complete. And knowing her track record of being deliberate about what she puts her name on, this ended up being the thing that made her actually say out loud what a lot of women are quietly dealing with.
She retired from American Ballet Theatre in 2025 after a career that rewrote what was possible in that world. She was the first Black woman named principal dancer at ABT, in a company that had been around for 75 years without one. Since then she’s moved into a new chapter, advocacy, authorship, motherhood, and now, increasingly, conversations she says she wasn’t having before.
“There’s always been a lot of thought that’s gone into the partnerships and the interviews and the spaces that I’m in,” she told me. “It really has to reflect my values. And that’s why this partnership means so much and I’m really excited for everyone to see it.”
For Copeland, it came down to one thing: Thorne wasn’t pretending every woman’s experience looks the same. “My symptoms don’t look like the symptoms that someone next to me might look like and that’s okay,” she said. “And we’re all unique and we all have different hormones and different >statistically more likely to enter perimenopause earlier, more likely to experience more severe symptoms, and still the least likely to have any of it taken seriously in a medical setting. As an athlete, she’d already been living a version of it for years.
“I think a double whammy on top of it is being an athlete and often being taught to struggle through the pain and fight through it,” she said. “And just that idea that people just assume that like, ‘Well, you’ve danced with six stress fractures, so you’ll be fine, girl.'”
She’s been lucky, she says, to have her husband Olu in her corner. Someone willing to advocate for her in moments she couldn’t find the words herself. And beyond him, community, which she kept coming back to throughout our conversation as this constant in her life. “There’s this through line that keeps coming back throughout my journey, throughout my career,” she said. “Mentorship and community. And that’s what I, again, feel through this campaign.”
I asked her what she wished someone had told her going into her 40s, partly for the story and partly, honestly, for myself. She kept it real.
“I would say to be patient with yourself, but don’t let up off the gas taking care of yourself,” she said. “Like whatever it is you’re going through, you’re feeling, and just giving yourself time to feel the things that you’re feeling.”
In her 30s she said it was all momentum, always pushing, always moving. Her 40s slowed that down, not because she ran out of drive but because she started actually listening. “Maybe you need to slow down a little bit, listen to yourself, see yourself, respect yourself, and enjoy it,” she said. “Enjoy the journey and not just flying by the seat of your pants.”
Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, perimenopause stopped feeling like something to dread and started feeling like something to actually prepare for. Credit to her, and honestly, credit to finally having the conversation.
The post At 43, Misty Copeland Is Opening Up About Perimenopause And Why More Women Need To Talk About It Sooner appeared first on Essence.