Female hysteria and PMS; Or, you can all just fuck off (first written in 2013)

The fact is, when my period’s due, the world is against me – it’s not just me being irrational. The strain on my jeans means my waistband cuts into the one-week muffin top that gets pissed away as soon as I start to bleed. The razorblades in my tits, which may look impressive from mid-cycle onwards, make me as hostile to human contact as a wounded wolf bitch, protecting her cubs, which, chances are I’ve howled at for failing to get their socks on in time for the school run.

Painful eruptions on my chin mean I take longer getting my face straight in the morning, and my temperature control – or lack of it – means I’m all over the place as the hormones work themselves up to a frenzy. It’s a two week pre-period marathon where my hair goes puffy, and I sweat as I run for the tube, or I shiver under a duvet, eating chocolate miserably before bed.

When the watershed happens, by which I mean, my period occurs, I thank the lord – or is it mourn? I can never quite decide – that I managed to successfully prevent conception for another month, despite that drunk fumble as last month’s offering was on the ebb and the mid-month rumpus where the condom slipped. Despite appearances – I do try to maintain an orderly outward appearance – I’m a slattern when it comes to remembering sanitary wear, and for the first day when it always takes me by surprise, and probably the last, too, when I’ve run out for another month, I make do with wads of sticky tissue that I hobble between my legs, which shreds itself disturbingly on my pubes.

It’s no worse for me than it is for any other woman, which is why we can be so unsympathetic about it to each other, but the fact is, it IS getting worse as I get older, with mittelschmertz spreading into PMT spreading into seven-day long bleed, giving me one week’s bliss per month where I feel relatively unscathed by my fucking, fucking hormones.

It’s getting me in trouble too. The tears, tantrums and tension that make and mar the day before it breaks. My mood, like the weather building in pressure until the storm passes and the month’s debris floods out of me in the calm of the morning after.

My body is built for babies, and its desire to be impregnated is also affecting my behaviour, from the intensity of my sex drive to whether or not I choose to smoke and drink – I’m more often drunk during my period and leading up to the release of an egg, in the (subconscious?) hope that carefree insemination might lead me up the duff, less so as my body begins to retain water and breasts start to ping (when there’s always a chance, acknowledged or otherwise) when I may have one in the oven). I got my coil out after all, rationally, or irrationally: I am being puppeteered beyond reason by my evolutionary pull to procreate.

I don’t really believe in free will. We’re all locked into a grid of existence of compulsions, reactions, hormones and genetics, of power and submission, nature and nurture that lead synapses to fire in only one direction – side to side, for women, apparently – affecting my spatial awareness and adding to a general sense of  discomfort with spreadsheets – which all but makes choice, genuine, unpolluted choice, and the freedom to act accordingly, an illusion.

This frees me of responsibility for my actions but it also frees others too  – a dangerous concept if acknowledged by more than just the psychologist and the philosopher, for then the state would have to accept that despots, rapists and pedophiles have no agency either, pushed and pulled by the tides of existence, history, circumstance, and the impact of their parents – and then who would we have to blame for society’s ills?

In the meantime, as I am tumbled about by the tick-tocking of my womb, all I would ask for is understanding, if I don’t always appear to act in accordance of responsibility, or god, forbid, rationality. We can all only act as we do, given our crosses to bear, playing the hand we’ve been dealt to the best of our abilities.

Or I could just get a grip and get on with it. That’s the other thing any of us can do about anything. We have no choice, after all.