I wrote a blog post about my period and it was trying too hard to be provocative, convincing, and intellectual. It didn’t capture the essence of what I was trying to say or relate. So here I go again.
The week before my period starts I’m filled with a sense of untraceable anger, grief. I cry for the world, for the violent atrocities that plague human history. I cry for mothers and children, brothers and sisters, mankind and its ongoing self-flagellation. My breasts ache, urging me to pull humanity into my swollen chest and muffle its painful tears. Instead, I hug my pillow tight against my chest, siphoning the intensity of this emotion into its willing softness. It tells me it can hold more and more, so I empty myself into it. Once hollow, I release myself from my chair and take hesitant steps onto my tingling legs. Back into the world I go.
The enhanced sensitivity to the world that accompanies crashing estrogen and progesterone is a gift that has been weaponized and turned into a curse we are pressured into avoiding or overcoming. We are labelled emotional, an insult equated with insanity and meant to invalidate any sort of credibility. As I cry over war, environmental destruction, inequality, isolation, loneliness, lives wasted, I don’t feel this anger or grief is at all irrational or misplaced; it seems to me to be the most topical, logical thing there is. “I understand now that I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, ‘For the same reason I laugh so often – because I’m paying attention.’”
Before you disregard the depression, anxiety, anger, grief, or whatever you feel the week before your period as a burden or curse, something that obscures your “rational” view of the world, entertain the thought that perhaps this time provides clear seeing into problems you’ve long ignored. Instead of succumbing to the masculine pressures of the world, to buck up and carry on and keep going, drop into this time of feeling, soft and alive, and listen to it. Don’t immediately relegate these strong emotions into the realm of irrationality or craziness (even though when I want to throw away all our spoons when they clatter in a shutting drawer, I do feel fucking crazy). Feel, cry, crumble. You will be made anew.
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