Now I am in my thirties, my menstrual cycle has become fairly predictable. In an ideal world, I would plan my most creative tasks around the build up to ovulation, when I am at my most productive and I have the most energy and in an ideal world I would take to my bed for the week following ovulation and not talk to a soul.
The reality is if I tracked my cycle and worked with it to make the most of that productive time - the time when I feel my best, I would only work one week a month. (And even then it ends with ovulation, which always feels like I have been kicked in the side by a horse so I would need a lie down, then too.)
Even as a freelancer, someone who is self-employed, I don’t have agency over what stage of a project I do at what time, or even if I have any work at all. I have two kids, and with them around as a constant, I too need to be constant but I can’t be and I won’t be.
I’m not a constant because I am a woman and chemicals flow around inside me and dictate how I will react, they dictate my mood, my energy levels - they dictate how I feel.
I have written before about how the children push my buttons into a burning rage on a certain week of my menstrual cycle. Behaviour that I might otherwise let go infuriates me to the point I can’t wholly control my reactions. I feel like a bad mum when I am due my period. It is a time I dread if I am honest and I wonder if there is anything I can do about it.
If I didn’t have a period, and my hormones remained constant, I would be consistent, but would that make me a better mum?
When I was pregnant, I remember missing my cycle. Not the bleed, obviously, I enjoyed not having to buy tampons, or worry about having them in my bag, but I missed the rhythm of it.
I was in a mode of constant tiredness, with consistently rising estrogen and progesterone. My hair was glossy and my skin was the best it had ever been. I was also notably nicer. I was so placid.
I remember this time, because before my pregnancy, I was trying so hard to get a promotion at work that I felt I deserved. I was angry, in fact, that I had been led to believe I would have been promoted long before, and yet so many people (men, often) were promoted ahead of me. I would rant and rage about how it wasn’t fair like a teenager. It was an injustice, and I often felt that it needed to be shouted about, and I did whenever I could find anyone who would listen.
But when I was pregnant, the wheels finally started to be put in motion. My mentor worked with the system and the office politics, which had been working against me, to put me in front of the right people, doing the right work, to get me promoted. I wonder, looking back, if it would have happened if I hadn’t been so flat. Perhaps my bursts of rage and anger had been getting in the way.
I wasn’t myself during that time. I didn’t feel the rage that I routinely feel now for the entire pregnancy. But it was also a time I got absolutely nothing done.
I was growing a baby, yes, I know. I did get something done. But in terms of any writing or reading, anything that wasn’t work really - there was zero productivity. So for all the calm in my emotions, it had been traded for a constant feeling of meh - a feeling that kept me sat on the sofa watching the entire season of Friends on repeat.
I truly believe there is power in our menstrual cycles. In taking that inevitable rage, a feeling I hope I can learn to deal with as my children get older, I also get that boost of energy - that spark of an idea and the lift of my mood. It is a pay off, albeit a delayed one.
Men may have called it hysteria all those years ago, but I’d rather have the rhythms of my menstrual cycle than a flatline of emotion.
With my cycle, I feel connected to my body as I feel it changing at each stage, and in tune with the planet and the cycle of the moon. I often feel lucky that I can tune in to all that, that I feel the hormones so strongly that I can’t ignore each phase passing through me, I have to give each my attention. I am learning about myself and my body. I am not just a brain inside a body, or an abstraction of emotions, a body of water in a cup, I am the cup too.
“It is a shame, such a shame, Harry thought,
that to be a human is to be one thing,
to be contained, to have these walls of skin and a singular sense of self that sloshes and slaps around inside of us like water on the inside of a well.”
― Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
I think of men and how strange it must be to have one mode. One constant perception of life - their lenses not significantly distorted by chemicals in their bodies. Perhaps, they are seen as more reliable, more predictable. Perhaps, with men, you know what you are going to get.
One week to feel my best? It doesn’t seem fair.
But I like to think of it as the week when I feel like I have super powers. I am wholly a woman and I can do absolutely anything, and maybe a few weeks feeling not ideal, maybe that makes it worth it and maybe, more importantly, that is what makes it possible.
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Are you easily affected by your menstrual cycle?
Do you have a super power week?
Would you rather we didn’t have menstrual cycles?
How do men feel? I would love to know!
If this post resonated with you, I would love to hear your stories.
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I watched a Gabor Mate interview recently and he said something along the lines of when women have their menstrual cycle it should be considered “truth telling time.” Their bodies are going through such an intense moment that that they are less likely to acquiesce and more like to say what they truly feel. He mentioned in some cultures this “super power” are why they are the leaders and decision makers. I’m saying it far less scientifically but if I find it I’ll share it with you.
I love absolutely everything you have written here 🤩🙏🏼❤️