hi dear readers, we are about to get into some edges of my individual and kapwa vulnerability. if you revere that, please consider subscribing to my substack. if you’re someone who needs this post, reach out to me and i’ll get you access no questions asked! ty for your witness.
x
I’m writing this essay with T-fourteen days before my PMDD symptoms will alchemize the exuberance of my essence into the presence of a hot plate. I’m writing this after taking two of the most jaw dropping nudes and sending them to my lover. My follicles are tickled, brand new and I am feeling like the smoothest ocean stone. I have grown to utterly CRAVE my period because it brings such relief that every time it feels like a spiritual molting in the most luxurious way you can.
PMDD stands for pre-menustral dysphoric disorder. I find it a bit of a redundancy as someone who’s gender varies on any given day (read: bakla gender fucker). I have various conflicting feelings about diagnosis, but I share this one as a starting point, a launching pad towards connection. To save time, I ask that you google PMDD! Then return here.
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Okay, yay you’re back! What did you find?
I am excited to write this because every time I’ve read any content or even brought it up to doctors (even from white non-binary she/theys at Kaiser Permamente) I have felt so queasy, angry, uncomfortable and dysphoric. If reading PMDD resources pisses you off, then this is for you. If you have a friend, a lover, that has PMDD this for you. If you ARE that friend or lover, this is for you!
Let’s begin. To simplify, I would like for us to remember these five, simplified facts about PMDD
It supposedly only effects 3% of people who menstruate
Most doctors will say it’s “more like the migraine version of PMS, if PMS was a headache”
There is a lack of research and resource because we know why
It sucks
It really fucking sucks.
I came to my PMDD diagnosis after finding myself cyclically in the pits of rotting terror. I thought maybe one of my other disabilities was worsening. Perhaps my new move, or being in my Saturn's return, holding a polycrisis, and the other thousands of very valid reasons why I could be experiencing extreme irritability and ideation in such a way that it was affecting the quality of all the things I love: my life, my loved ones, my ability to be imaginative and in my creative flow.. I don’t like over identifying with diagnosis AND if I deny myself the opportunity to entertain some research and information that could help me understand myself, who does that serve?
Everyone’s hormonal history is so very different. Here’s mine.
When I was fifteen, I grew up in a food desert red-lined area known for the best potlucks, varsity underdog glory (read: 0 PTA, 0 parents who are resourced), gun violence and teenage pregnancy. This means there was a lot of Freedom Writers-esque savior complexes in my teachers, the programs that came guinea pig’d the community of the Black, brown, immigrant, refugee, and the “diversity soup” of marginalized kids. My theory about the hyper-fixation of teenage pregnancy in this area, where billboards of pro-life advertisements littered the air, was also a desire to sterilize brown egg-having bodies. One of the programs brought a free clinic. This clinic was offering free IUD’s and other types of birth control to students in my high school, but the hormonal IUD was the most advertised and most controversial in the community at the time.
I was very irregular on my period, I’d bleed every other month. I was sexually active and was allured by the possibility of my period never returning using this birth control. Of course that meant a cold speculum that duck billed inside me and opened me up so that the IUD could get up in and past my cervix.
My friend accompanied me, also interested in getting a Mirena IUD. We agreed to go with eachother.
“So which of you want to go first?”
“Coconut*, you go first.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah I think I need to see what happens before it happens to me.
“I mean I’m down but are you sure that isn’t going to psyche you out?”
Spoiler alert: It did in fact, psyche my friend out.
*the answers to all the majority of your red flag questions about this nickname is, yes.
My teenage self would pride themselves in telling this story by saying that I bee-lined to a four hour soccer practice right after that. That included running 2.5 miles before practice, and running the lines on the soccer field. My friend sat out, nearly fainted in their procedure, and proceeded to drink water with a tube of icy hot on their side til soccer practice was done.
The fact is that I was disassociated out of my mind. I was able to tune out my pain and keep it trekking forward. There was no time for pain. No care for it. No validity. Stay tuned for my essay on prioritizing eroticism when you have a well practiced disassociation embodiment, or, when your spirit must thrive elsewhere.
I had that IUD in for about seven years, when I went to planned parenthood to get it out, Trump was incoming as president for his first time. I didn’t want to have another IUD in, but the providers coerced me to get another hormonal IUD because Trump was likely to ban abortions on a national level. I understood where they were coming from, but asking a young adult about getting another IUD after just having a procedure to get an IUD out is actually unhinged. There wasn’t a lot of time to discuss my options. It happened. I went home. I disassociated. I would cry about this years later as a rupture in my care-received from Planned Parenthood. An organization I was literally hired to be the face of!
So then after admitting I was being a bit pompous in my bambified decision to get an IUD, after admitting what brought me to that quick-footedness: fear of my body getting pregnant at a young age. Valid, but still not entirely informed, especially in the age of pro-abstinence sex-education l oooo l!
Then, I got it out three years later. I was on a journey to heal my body of all it’s survivorship and something about synthetic hormones and a plastic alien device in my uterus felt invasive.
I didn’t have a period for ten years.
When I re-entered into menstruating it was the top of pandemic. This is the part of the essay where I tell us to stop compartmentalizing our bodies away from the sick air, the sick land, the raging ocean.
Of course I have PMDD. It is not THAT perplexing how. I am also not interested in asking the question: why do I have it? I’m interested in how do I create outlets for my most unhinged symptoms?
I had to go through a series of acceptance that there is a point of no return. I can’t return to a baseline of my hormonal body because there never was a baseline. My hormonal body got disrupted as a young teenager from medical harm and systemic damage. When I got my IUD out, no one told me that maybe I should look into hormonal support for my body to transition back to its “natural rhythms.”
I am still striving to figure out what a natural rhythm is for my body when once a month I feel like the only way I can come back into my body is if I run miles and miles. Is if I soak my body in a bath tub for days. Or just accept that I am going to ideate tough. How can I make space for tiny acceptance? I am constantly stewing on what syntax, what recipe of acceptance I must gift myself when the world, my egg-giver, my friends who might be tapped out, the therapist who can’t talk me out of my spiral anyways…
A peer of mine who reached out to me asking for any PMDD hacks.
“I know I need to just accept whatever hindrances exist in my body because I’m just a creature on the planet but still. I just got shit to do.”
We have a life to live! We deserve fun and play and ease and just existing.
Couple things here. We live in a systemic world that cannot fathom rest. For those of us with lack of familial support and lack of financial fishnets to catch us…. Rest = Unpaid days = Cycle of Poverty.
Not resting* = $$ = more stress = worse symptoms = relational loss, fracture = less relational resource to support = poverty.
So here’s my formula for trying to survive:
“LOOOOONG text incoming:
I’m still learning tbh! But I have a bag of Marea (it’s like a mix of vitamins) for PMDD symptoms I am supposed to drink throughout the month. I make lil cocktails out of them TBH I have an extra one if you’d like to have it! Ashwaganda tea.
For our diaspora medicine: bittermelon tea, you can also make a vinegar with bittermelon and then let it steep for a month (I can send you a screen shot of my recipe in a moment), mallungayyyyy on everything. Food magic!
Making orange juice, coconut milk, coconut water, pink salt, vinegar cocktails. Those help with stress and adaptogens
I am now trying to honor that I need space to rage so doing something cathartic like exercising and moving my body is important so I use class pass to mix it up between restorative yoga, more high intensity things, sensual space and pole!
The messier things are making space to choose into unhingedness as a mundane thing. Getting really unmasked with myself. That looks like seriously being weird and strange af. Like jumping around shaking my body. Vocalizing toning - echolaliaaa things. Writing as much as I want. Dancing. Allowing myself to make and express.
Annnnd I also make a lil eco system of care and reach out to rant, cry vent esp one week before my period/one day before I get peak irate or ideation-y
I’m also at the point where I MUST take atleast one bath a day but that’s also cuz I have chronic pain - fibrooo.
Oh ya micro dose shrooms && therapy && honestly sex & kink“
Suprise it’s not a formula because all of our bodies need different things. It’s a list of things I am trying, attempting, fumbling and meandering at.
& of course there is medication that can support treatment of PMDD that is available. It is just not the route my body feels comfortable with!
PMDD is the type of diagnosis that transforms your life. It tips you over. It’s a monstrosity asking for more love more care in a world that has a deep deficit. It’s a stigmatized diagnosis because god forbid any of us are actually that unwell. The mass of people who hate the spectral of trans, queer, and uterus having people blame our reproductive organs before outing the honest on the systems that contributed to the environments that exasperate our conditions.
God forbid that we need an entirely different world to restore ourselves. To yell in the stress to cry in the way a wolf would. To grieve to rage. But of course rage in a way that’s palatable, sexy, beneficial for the world. What if it was just for you? What if birthing the new world meant also being sick of the old one?
Even our diagnoses are expected to create beautiful worlds for everyone else. Using our sick bodies as the vessel to molt the world out of.
As an artist how terribly lucky I am to have an endless tar pit of underworld pains to transmute into art and pleasure. It is so gloriously backwards. So what if I built care systems with art, what are skills can I apply to get creative in impossible circumstances?
It’s made it so important for me to have frameworks of kink, art practices, plant medicine to keep me alive, and sanctuaries to keep me safe. I really implore us people of coerced diaspora to really look at the plants of our lands. The ones we do not have access to wherever our lil dandelion seed selves have puffed away to.
This next part is for experienced kinky professionals and lifestylers— the week before your period is a great time to have a sadistic scene set up. Book extra therapy sessions. Do fire rituals. Hit a tree with a stick until your rage is more ember than flaming asteroid. Tell a friend where you are. Be honest with people when they ask why you’re grumpy or irate. Explore your erotic nature! Rave. Fuck with yourself. Allow yourself to have more needs than you might be comfortable with! Allow yourself to suffer. Choose it back. Who needs to be there to witness you?
Rage is one of the uncontained symptoms I have. The rage in our bodies is from so much suppression, much like the fire suppression tactics that have been ongoing for a century now in Southern California. It is TOO MUCH to express and hold your rage all by yourself, so who or what is there for you to help in facilitating these rage rituals?
When the PMDD symptoms relieve themselves when your first panty-boxer blood drop reveals itself, allow yourself to REVEL! IN! THE! RELIEF! This is also the time you can make space for any apologies and accountability for the times you fanged up at the people that love you. Do not hoard your relief. It has the ability to tear, drop and ripple out to your kapwa-tid.
Perhaps one of the unconscious reasons I became a kink professional is because I could unleash my sadism on people that I was in a financial transaction with. If you’re an erotic laborer, adult industry professional, I still recommend to still make structures that do not depend on your clients in this way. Do you have a play partner you can lean on? Can you go to a rope jam?
One of my favorite moments of being unabashedly kinky is when I took my partners dildo and cut it up into pieces and made them watch. I cut it up because I realized it was inside other people and I needed to facilitate a cord cutting on behalf of myself and through my relationship. I was tired of these shitty people occupying the psychic space of my lover and by proxy me. I had my partner take scissors and cut every cis-fetish fantasy of him, every evil eye on me, and every hook that was waiting for my downfall. I allowed myself to naysay everyone of those unsovereign energies. I had him record it. When I pull it back up, I see myself like a shucked oyster. Raw, wild. Convicted. And salty.
This is all a practice. I don’t have health insurance. I don’t live in a country that cares about autonomy or wellness actually. I still consistently have month cycles where I get in a blow up argument with the people I never want to lose. I’ve learned levels of accountability and repair that I never knew was possible to do without being discarded. Are there people you can commit to? Devote to? Who can love you through this? Can you love yourself through this?
Even with all odds against you, there are sanctuaries. There is reprieve.
But we must first become masons. Architects that wield eroticism in one hand and the tropical storm of PMDD in the other.
