I did not expect that my second Substack post would be about periods, but here we are. That’s just what’s in flow — quite literally. Before I lose a fair number of you who assume this post is not for you, I would like to assert that this post is for everyone, both people with and without uteruses, both people with and without periods. It’s for cis-men with children. It’s for co-workers. It’s for partners. And it matters because the more we know about the ways that people can show up, the better we are able to name how we show up, and the better we are able to attune to ourselves and the people in our lives. I also want to acknowledge sitting with some ignorance about how to best talk about periods beyond the cis-female and pre-menopausal perspectives. If you feel moved to share preferences in the comments for this budding community, please do. Thanks for being here, friends.
Okay, so — my moon cycle gave me hell last week. I struggled to string words and thoughts together, which felt embarrassing in a couple of facilitation spaces. I ate more than feels comfortable for my body on a few occasions. And I met someone new during a work meeting who said things that hit the deep something-is-wrong-with-me wound. I dissociated into a trauma freeze state for a few hours after. For nearly 10 days, I was easily confused and overwhelmed by what I knew was a late period, and rather than accept it, I fought with it and pressed ‘play’ on the something’s “wrong with me” loop.
Very difficult phases of PMS are not unfamiliar to me; I’ve experienced them most of my life. They’ve affected my long term mental health, friendships and romantic relationships, social anxiety, and confidence. They’ve also impacted my creativity, intuitive capabilities, and dreams, but I’ve spent more time trying to fix myself than notice silver linings.
Around 2017 when I was in early-stage burnout and searching for anything that would explain my faulty wiring, I stumbled across PMDD. According to John’s Hopkins Medicine, “Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a much more severe form of premenstrual syndrome (PMS). It’s a severe and chronic medical condition that needs attention and treatment.” The 11 symptoms of PMDD include:
Anger or irritability.
Feeling on edge, overwhelmed or tense.
Anxiety and panic attacks.
Depression and suicidal thoughts.
Difficulty concentrating.
Fatigue and low energy.
Food cravings, binge eating or changes in appetite.
Headaches.1
Women who experience 5 of these symptoms are said to experience PMDD. I experience all 11 of them. I didn’t learn the term PMDD (Premenstral Dyphoric Disorder) until it had reigned over nearly 20 years of my life. When I was consistently living far out of alignment, PMDD would affect me for 2-3 weeks of my 4-5 week cycle — half of my life. Now, as I strive to live more in alignment, this window has narrowed significantly to about 5-7 days. I’m sure everyone who experiences PMDD would describe it differently, but when I’m in this phase of my cycle, my life is hijacked as I’m taken to the dark side of the moon. My inner world is very little or nothing like the one I feel pressure to exude externally. Last week, after an abnormally difficult month, my PMDD symptoms came on like a mid-winter blizzard, and a complex and disorienting constellation of parts took over inside.
Gratefully, I had an IFS (Internal Family Systems)2 session scheduled for the end of the week, and I met some of the important parts connected to my experience of PMDD. There were protectors who felt broken, frustrated, and lost, and along with them I found a complex system of parts carrying shame across time, from my present body’s experience and also from back and back, from long before me. A guide part also emerged to share three messages with me:
Patience.
Let go.
There is nothing wrong with you.
The next morning at the start of my weekend, I played some music and then made a mental list of all of the things I would reorganize in the living room before I sat down to watch the final episodes of The Ultimatum, had a good cry, slowed, and got honest about needing a “do nothing” couch day. Then after days of waiting, my period arrived.
When my period flows, I return to flow. Shame, anxiety, vivid daydreams, writing, music, and overwhelm begin to move through.
Recently, I’ve found it helpful to embrace this ‘flow’ metaphor. The days or weeks I feel frozen before flow, my system needs grace, love, and understanding. Because of my PMDD symptoms, those ways of being are often unavailable to me. In fact, the opposite ensues. And our cultural misogyny towards periods, not to mention naming this condition a “dysmorphic disorder”, have not helped.
‘Dysmorphic’ means being characterized by malformation, or “irregular, anomalous, abnormal, or faulty formation or structure”.3 The addition of ‘disorder’ just helps the embedded metaphors double its ass down on internalized shame.
Cognitively I know there is nothing wrong with me at all, and that the parts of me struggling with this condition are judged harshly by the patriarchy. Moving more slowly, having a slower wit, staying quiet, and withdrawing to expand capacity despite overwhelm are not qualities held in high regard. And my inner critic speaks with weaponry of that judgement even in an internal system that knows better now. Cognitively I know that these messages are from a singularity-based, productivity-obsessed, fast-paced culture steeped in white supremacy and predatory capitalism. Cognitively I know it is these values that are at the root of my shame wound. Yet in our culture, slow, quiet, and withdrawn are usually consciously or subconsciously regarded as defective, wrong, and weak.
Assuming I will experience another challenging round of PMDD again in the not too far future, I feel compelled to help myself flip the script. Wanna join me? Here are some questions I’m pondering:
What if rather than viewing PMDD as a disorder, it was imagined as unique access to intense depths of darkness followed by passionate flames of the burning sun?
What if rather than feeling like I had to wear a mask to make it through a day in the “real world”, I could arrange time in such a way that would make being myself more accessible? (Hello, entrepreneurship.)
What if I could answer the question ‘How are you?’ during a work meeting honestly and include how my cycle is impacting my physical and mental experience?
What if we viewed partners as responsive support during our cycle and educated people about PMS and PMDD sans uncomfortable details only?
What if we talked about our periods beyond uncomfortable symptoms and fertility to include a more expansive range of lived experience (eg. artists, boss b’s, teens…)?
What if PMDD is a part of my superpower that only 2-8% of women get to experience?4
What if the whole culture shifted its values towards this frequency? (I mean, “What if the culture shifted?” is my #1 question every day, really.)
I think about the world in terms of frequencies, the ones from our bodies and our ways of being in the world, our art, and our values. I think about frequencies in terms of ascending and descending waves moving with the great spiral of all life. Our bodies are part of that sacred cycle. The darkness that I descent into monthly is part of the spectrum of light that I also experience. I learned this lesson most profoundly from Francis Weller and his description of the grief <=> joy spectrum.5 Without the full experience of one, we do not experience the other.
As I write this piece and the darkness is giving way to some light. I’m physically releasing what I was carrying from the last moon phase. Clarity returns as does creative energy. I delight in the taste of water. I want to dirty my hands in the soil and then paint my fingernails the color of auras. Playing piano feels exquisite. My vivid dreams offer important symbolism.
My work is to remember that when I hear “there’s something is wrong with you” inside, that that’s the fucking patriarchy. I forget this again and again because the conditioning is so deep. And you don’t have to have a period or PMDD to become know what I’m talking about, right? Some of you hear this voice, too? What needs fixing? What more or less should I be doing? What are they doing over there that’s better than what I’m doing?
My work is to create enough space in my life to breathe, create, and heal in order to keep remembering that there is nothing wrong with me, even when I’m at the bottom of the ocean. There’s nothing wrong with me, or you, or us.
I’m bleeding as I write this, and in this singular moment, I know that there is nothing to be ashamed of. I’m just on my journey back to the other side from the darkness. Just like the moon. Just like the tides. Just like the sunrise.
poem by Jacqueline Suskin
A special thank you to my friends who talked to me about periods last week. Your care and interest inspired me to write this!
This month, paid subscribers can enjoy the following Invitations for Practice including two journal prompts and two gender-neutral artistic activities to support your relationship with periods and work through the lie that there is something wrong with you. For more writing support from me, check out my self-guided class series Creative Writing for a Year of Emergence through Resonance Institute.
Invitations for Practice
Enjoy these writing prompts and invitations for personal practice! Everything here is purely suggestion. Do what feels good and right, leave what doesn’t.
Journal Prompts
What is your experience with the “something wrong with you” voice? What does that part of you say? What is it trying to fix? Where do the beliefs that anything is wrong with you come from? How are those beliefs in alignment or out of alignment with your values?
Select a line from Jacqueline Suskin’s poem above that resonates with you. What does that line make you wonder about? What does it help you remember about your truth and your values? What is the line a metaphor for in your life right now, and how does that metaphor offer permission for you to be as you are without needing to be fixed?
Explore
For embodied equity: Embodied equity is a practice of attunement to your inner and outer relationships, the body, and natural systems in alignment with your values.
#1. For internal relationships:
Draw a moon (a circle) big on a piece of paper. Draw a line or squiggle down the center. Label one side ‘dark’ and the other side ‘light’.
Begin on the ‘dark’ side and list the emotions, thoughts, self talk, activities, and experiences that occur when you’re moving through a dark phase (PMS, PMDD, or any dark phase if your experience is not one with periods).
On the ‘light’ side, list the emotions, thoughts, experiences, expressions, curiosities, activities, and dreams that take place when you move back towards the light, move from frozen to flow, or, you know, your period starts.
Reflect in writing: What if everything on the the ‘light’ side is dependent on the what happens in the ‘dark’? How does this change your perspective about moving through the dark? What is a mantra you might offer yourself through the times of darkness?
#2 For external relationships: Select a space in which bringing some attention to periods, PMS, and PMDD feel like it could be helpful to yourself or others. It might be just you alone with yourself, in might be in a specific relationship with another person, friend, or romantic partner, it might be in a group work or social environment.
We’re going to make some lists. First, make a list of how you expect yourself or others to show up in this space. For instance, you might make a list about how you expect yourself to show up in work meetings or a list about how you expect your partner to show up for you every day.
Next, make a list of new or dawning insights about the experience of periods, PMS, or PMDD from this piece, other resources, or conversations you’ve engaged with. What feels important to know about what this experience can be like?
Compare your lists and reflect in writing: Where might there be dissonance between expectations of yourself or others and what you or others may be experiencing during a moon cycle? How does this consideration apply to your ways of approaching yourself or others all the time? What considerations transcend gender and could be applied to anyone in your life? What values are you practicing within this context?
Self Magazine - https://www.self.com/story/pmdd-symptoms-not-to-ignore
Internal Family Systems Institute - https://ifs-institute.com/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysmorphic
National Institute of Health - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532307/#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20approximately,for%20the%20diagnosis%20of%20PMS.
Francis Weller “5 Gates of Grief” - YouTube (yes, ironically from a men’s conference)