Periods and grief really don't mix

What fresh hell is this?

I feel like grief should come with several warnings:

It will make you wish you were dead.

It will be more lonely than you could ever imagine.

It will turn the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle into a waking nightmare.

I know that people say “no one is talking about this” about topics that it turns out lots of people actually are talking about but I don’t think I’m alone in this and I really don’t think people are talking about it, how the seven to 14 days before a period can feel unlivable when you’re bereaved.

The last time came as a slap in the face after a not-entirely-terrible week.

I’d made it out of the house, attended a Covid-safer art class and social which coincided with (and contributed to) the first day I hadn’t cried since my mum’s death.

I allowed myself to believe that it might be possible that I wouldn’t feel completely dreadful at all times for the rest of my life.

Then a few days later, the fact that she’d died felt as shocking and unbearable as the day it happened and I couldn’t stop crying to the point of hyperventilation and didn’t understand why.

I couldn’t even think about sleeping, was only calmed by typing a series of increasingly unhinged Substack drafts into the early hours (no, this isn’t one of them) — writing that, in retrospect, seems like the ravings of someone who’d lost their mind, probably because it was.

A couple of days after that, as I was lying on my bed fantasising that a medieval knight would run me through with his sword (most decidedly not a euphemism), I realised that there might be some connection between my bleak and overwhelming emotions and my fucking stupid hormones.

I’ve always had horrendous PMS, although it took me a long time to grasp that my depression and anxiety got worse on a predictable schedule.

Even after I figured it out, it still stuns me every month that I feel alternately homicical and suicidal.

That’s every month for the last — excuse me while I howl — 34 years, with (if my mum’s experience is any indication, which science says it should be) at least another decade to go.

And it won’t be a fun and stable decade, it’ll be a perimenopausal one.

I’m so sick of hearing about the perimenopause (there’s a topic people claim no one is discussing that PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY TAKING ABOUT NON-STOP), let alone starting to live through it.

I’m still early in the process, but my cycles have started shortening, meaning I have more periods than before, which translates into more PMS than ever and less ability to predict when I might be menstruating. Fantastic.

So in addition to the fact that grief is making it hard to read, write or blink, I spend at least ten days every month sinking into a pit of despair before bleeding profusely (because of course, I couldn’t have light cycles, even now) and writhing in debilitating pain before I get a few days’ reprieve and then it all starts up again.

Grief is exhausting and sickening but grief and periods together should come with a health advisory.

I would take those contraceptive pills that let you skip bleeding if I could but they make me even weirder and weepier (also apparently I’m now too old) and I’ve historically had a bad time with anti-depressants too, meaning I have to raw dog life when I’d much rather be numb.

I don’t know if the PMS might get easier with the B vitamins I’ve just purchased in the desperate hope of relief, or if grief ever lifts a little and makes periods more bearable.

At the moment my main strategies for coping are crying constantly and moaning at online grief groups where fellow attendees are very empathetic but can’t actually seem to STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING.

I remember when my mum “went through the menopause” as we called it at the time when what was probably actually happening was the last year or so of perimenopause.

Her mum had just died and we had dangerous and violent neighbours who harrassed us, threw a brick through our window (and later, after we’d left, murdered someone) and I remember her as altered during that time, only stopping crying long enough to rage.

She came out of it eventually, mellowed, and was relieved to be on the other side, but it took a while and she wasn’t living alone.

Culturally, we act like PMS isn’t real, isn’t invasive, and doesn’t run or ruin our lives but in truth, it is and it can. It feels like I’ve been taken over by the hulk or a crying baby, depending on the hour.

It’s like grief: it feels so awful it shouldn’t be allowed, and yet most people seem to have accepted that’s just how life is.

I find myself incredibly envious of what I imagine to be the stable emotional graph of cis men’s experience, which is probably reductive but the freedom of not experiencing hormonal mood swings and bleeding (which, may I remind you, is PROFUSE) for decades at a time sounds like unimaginable freedom and I’m so jealous I could scream.

This is the point in any post where you have to wrap things up with something sage or funny or thought-provokingly nuanced but all I can say is that PMS sucks, so does grief, and I don’t know what to do about any of it.

It’s all such a bloody mess.