Recently, I’ve been taking a break from hormonal birth control. Soon after I finish nursing school, I will be starting a family. Ideally, I’ve struggled with fertility in the past. I think it was related to birth control. According to the latest research, it can take up to a year for your fertility to return to normal.

This means that once again I’m faced with hormonal challenges related to my cycle. We should err on the side of caution when diagnosing ourselves online. But I may have PMDD or premenstrual dysmorphic disorder. Starting the third week, right before my period is slated to begin, I have had crippling depression lately. As soon as my period arrives, there’s a wave of relief, and I’m back to a baseline of being relatively happy and functioning well in my fast-paced life.

The third week of my cycle, leading up to my period, I face an immense resistance to pleasure and caring for myself. What has helped is identifying the cyclical nature of this change. This happens like clockwork once a month. If it’s worse lately, I’m blaming the lack of sunlight and the bitter cold where I live in Upstate New York. I think all of these factors contribute to our health and well-being.

Not to mention, we are fast approaching the holiday season. The holidays are fun for children and some adults, though I don’t know any. For most of us, there’s a financial strain and perhaps familial stress. Such is life and being an adult in the world. During this time, I find myself dissociating from my body more. This can look like ignoring hunger cues, working through lunch, or scrolling YouTube for hours when I can’t sleep, instead of cracking open a book from the stack of unread books on my nightstand.

The first two weeks of my cycle, my skin is clear, exercising is easy, and I masturbate almost daily. It’s helped immensely to label and identify what is going on with my body. I think our devices and our online lives reward and foster disconnection. Simply being aware that my negative, dark thoughts could be hormonal is not dismissive; instead, it softens that voice without trying to destroy or ignore it.

I think it’s important for women to know and understand what is normal and abnormal.

 Plenty of women with endometriosis or chronic pain have had their symptoms dismissed by healthcare professionals, which is why I hesitantly bring up what I fear that I may be diagnosed with. I think that the depths that my depression can go to right before my period are abnormal premenstrual symptoms. And my sister has been diagnosed with the same disorder.

This disorder is treated with SSRIs, birth control, stress management, and lifestyle adjustments. Before I’d take medication, I would like to understand physiologically which medication I would respond best to, which, believe it or not, is a test that you can have done. Instead, I’ve opted for stress management and lifestyle changes.

So what does that look like? For me, this means adhering to a daily yoga routine, even in the darker, lethargic parts of my cycle. But maybe I don’t push myself to the edge with working out during that time. Or ever really. Daily yoga or breathing practices are effective for stress management, but let’s be honest, these are stressful times we live in.

Any stress-management tips you see online or hear about feel like drops of water in an ocean. As I stated earlier, a simple mindfulness practice of labeling and identifying the underlying causes of troubling emotions can lessen the harmful impact of a doom-and-gloom spiral. But it takes practice. Self-love during this cyclical change is especially challenging.

During my follicular phase or ovulation, masturbation is easy, natural, and necessary. The luteal phase is when I have to be more conscious about it. Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I enjoy the ups and the downs of my cycle. And once my period arrives, I’m relieved and relaxed. In many ways, I’m lucky and grateful. My self-love practices mean that I don’t have painful cramps, and I don’t have any of the diagnoses that make that time almost unlivable for a lot of women.

And, frankly, as many in this community have been known to say, this is why women are built to be bottomless pits of pleasure. I wouldn’t give up the challenging parts of my cycle if it meant giving up that sweet ovulatory phase. The experience of pleasure needs the experience of suffering to prevent us from taking anything in this life for granted. After the resistance comes the embrace, and the cycle begins anew.

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