Who Am I Without PMDD?

I’m 35 and I’m scared. Not because of that ever present, relentless existential dread that’s constantly pounding in the back of my head, but because I’m about to voluntarily put my body into a state of chemical menopause. Shut down shop and call it quits for two organs that cause my mind to become a veritable wasteland of self-destruction in the week leading up to my period.

Had I have been 21, this news would be a blessing to me. I never thought I would have children nor did I care if that one, unalienable right for women to bear children was taken away from me. But at 35, I’ve come to a different place. A place where, for the first time in my life, a small portion of me wondered about the possibility of having biological children with my partner. It’s not that I was particularly attached to this notion, but having that ability was a freedom. Some form of autonomy over my own body which I, and women everywhere have been cajoled into believing is some kind of generous, life affirming blessing. Not that it’s not a blessing or a wonderful thing for many. But maybe it’s just not the ultimate end game to life as a woman, and maybe it’s okay to question the narrative we are constantly sold. Are children life-changing? Certainly. But there’s more to a woman than the sum of the parts she bears.

So who am I without my ovaries? What is my biological function if I can no longer reproduce?

Well let me, dear reader explain what I am with my ovaries intact.

Evolution at its least finest. A creature who one minute, finds all the greatest splendor and beauty in the world, only have that beauty come crumbling down the next. I am a phoenix. Once a month, I rise from the ashes, only to burn myself down again. For the first half of my menstrual cycle, I am me. And for the second half, I am living in a constant state of the pure emotion that one feels right before taking their fist through a wall. There is no rationale to it. Just my body over-reacting to the chemical drop in estrogen and progesterone.

I don’t know what I want in this state. Chaos. Revenge. Love. A hysterical sob in the bathroom at work. To burn down Westeros with my dragon. Mostly to flee to anywhere that isn’t here. Sometimes I quit jobs impulsively or leave school. Other times I commit myself to inpatient facilities only for my menstrual cycle to end and for my sanity to return.  And then I wonder, what in the actual fuck was going on in my mind the other day?

So if I say I’ve been at war with myself, it’s not some deep literary allegory. My body just can’t physically stand itself sometimes.

I guess I should be celebrating in some revelatory victory that I have the chance to cut out the invader inside of me. Why do I care that the part of me I can’t stand is coming to an end? I’ve always thought that if I were to have children I would adopt anyways, so why, why now do I give any fucks that I can’t have biological children? That was never what I felt to be right for me from such a young age… I always felt it in my bones. Some strange premonitory feeling that I was infertile, that something was broken reproductively inside of me.  And the immense urge to care for a child that was not of my own flesh.

Is this mourning coming from some deep, evolutionary desire for me to pass this damaged genetic material down to another creature? To see if I can strike lightening to bring to life a better version of myself who will ultimately grow up to have complicated feelings of love towards me? I’ve never felt like that was my legacy, so why now am I mourning its loss?

I think I’m not mourning the loss of an unborn child so much as it is that I’m mourning the loss of myself. The loss of so much time, grief and pain on a condition I never knew I had until now.

Could I have been someone different? Someone better, more successful than this person I am now? Who would I be without the pain?

I don’t know that I’d recognize that version of myself.

I don’t think I have any idea of what that life looks like.

But I have the chance to get to know that version of me now. And I really want to know that person. I really, really do.

Link to article: https://iapmd.org/blog-posts/who-am-i-without-pmdd-brett-fowler