Misty Copeland spent decades making the impossible look effortless, and now she’s learning something harder: how to slow down.

The legendary dancer, who made history as the first Black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, retired from the stage last year after a career that reshaped ballet for an entire generation. Since then, she’s been building a very different daily routine, one centered on raising her young son, Jackson, recovering from major surgery, and working through the physical and emotional shifts that come with perimenopause at 43.

It’s a lot. But Copeland is approaching it the same way she approached every rehearsal: with intention.

“I’m being more intentional and giving myself more grace,” Copeland said, “and just really thinking about how I’m taking care of myself internally.”

That shift in focus didn’t come automatically. For most of her adult life, Copeland’s relationship with her body was about output, precision, performance. Fueling correctly, training hard, pushing through injuries. She’s been open about the physical toll that career took, and she’s candid that post-baby life at 43, with a history of serious injuries, requires a completely different kind of attention. The questions she’s asking herself now aren’t about what her body can do on a stage. They’re about what it needs just to feel well day to day.

Perimenopause has added another layer to that conversation. The hormonal shifts are unpredictable in a way that no amount of discipline can fix, and for a woman who built her identity around control and precision, that’s been a real adjustment.

Ritual has helped.

Copeland described leaning on the concept of ritual as a grounding tool, something she said was central to her ballet life, too. “I’ve always thought of ballet class every single morning as a ritual that really would ground me and center me in times that you might feel out of control,” she said. She’s applying that same framework now, finding new rituals to anchor herself during a season of life that doesn’t come with a rehearsal schedule or a performance date.

She’s also partnered with Thorne, a science-backed health and wellness company, to help her work through the perimenopause journey with better information and better tools. The interview at Scary Mommy goes deeper into how that partnership is shaping her approach to this chapter. For Copeland, part of what drew her to the work is Thorne’s commitment to telling real stories from diverse women across different walks of life, conversations she said feel genuinely relatable rather than clinical.

She’s passionate about breaking the silence around perimenopause more broadly. “We just all have such unique and different experiences as women,” she said. “So it’s important that we really get to know what we’re going through so we can address it and be OK and open about having these sometimes uncomfortable conversations.”

That discomfort, she thinks, isn’t accidental. It’s cultural. These are topics that weren’t supposed to be discussed out loud, and a lot of women her age grew up absorbing that message. Copeland doesn’t accept it anymore.

One of the most meaningful parts of her transition off the stage was personal in a way that had nothing to do with hormones or health routines. Her son, Jackson, was there for her final bow. For a woman whose career defined so much of her identity and her sense of self, having him witness that closing moment carried a weight that’s hard to put into words.

It’s worth thinking about what that kind of transition looks like for any parent. You build something extraordinary, you give it everything you have, and then you walk away. Not because it failed, but because that chapter is simply finished and the next one is waiting. If you’re navigating your own version of that, whether it’s a career shift, an empty nest, a health challenge you didn’t see coming, Copeland’s approach offers something practical to hold onto. Find your ritual. Get curious about what your body actually needs right now, not what it needed ten years ago. And talk about the hard stuff openly, because other women in your neighborhood, your carpool, your book club are almost certainly going through something similar and wondering if it’s just them.

For resources on perimenopause and women’s midlife health, the Office on Women’s Health at womenshealth.gov is a solid starting point, and The Menopause Society offers research-backed guidance for women and their healthcare providers.

It isn’t just them. And it wasn’t just Misty Copeland, either.