hello from the bottom of the sea
ADHD, PMS and a little offering
When my back started aching a few days ago, I felt like crying. That pain meant I was seven days away from starting my period. The menstrual cycle I live my life in just feels…gosh…relentless. Sometimes it feels like I get two weeks of each month to do what I need to do. And then two weeks of each month to survive so that I can do what I need to do during the next weeks.
My endometriosis means that I feel pain in spots all over my body. At its best, it’s a dull ache. At its worst, it’s a lot like the first couple hours of labor. But the pain isn’t such a big deal. I can move through the hurt. It’s what happens to my head and heart that really slows me down.
My ADHD medication doesn’t work well during the last half of my menstrual cycle. And so those days are little like sinking. Each day is slightly lower than the one before. And by the end of the last seven days, trying to think is like trying to breathe at the bottom of the ocean.
I am finishing this week’s newsletter today. (If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ve been able to keep up with this newsletter’s edits, Riley comments and in one of my favorite reader discussions ever, the number shock!) The piece should have been published by this afternoon.
And yesterday I thought I was on track. But it’s day 5 of the last 7 days. And I woke up this morning further from the surface than I expected. I’m sitting in front of my computer, communicating from the bottom of the ocean! It’s just hard to type quickly under that kind of pressure.
I decided to send this to you all after laying down on the rug for a little while. I remembered that sometimes if you can’t think of what to say, you can offer something instead.
So I’m sharing a homeculure newsletter that many of you haven’t read. It’s from 2021, when there were only about about a thousand people reading here each week. Usually the archive is for paid subscribers only. But I took the paywall off of this one so that all subscribers can read it.
It’s a short little essay that I think Mary Shelley would’ve liked. It’s “all rot, blood and a tiny ovarian cemetery. You know Shelley loved a good cemetery.”
The Starts and Ends of Creation
My ADHD medication isn't as effective during the last half of my menstrual cycle. Which is kind of inconvenient, as that's two weeks out of every month. Or, you know, half of my lived life. When I asked a doctor about it, his response was pretty incurious,
I’ll be back here in a day or two, as soon as I start moving toward the surface.
O Meg--thank you for normalizing the vagaries of menstrual cycles and bodies, and how it takes a toll and for NOT working through it. Seriously, yes to all of that. Spend time with rest. And we'll always eagerly await your next post whenever it happens. Who needs the work week cycle, speaking of cycles, anyway? Created by a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to control our bodies and labor. So yes to paying attention to our own cycles too! 💜
I got really, really into this stuff while dealing with infertility (not just the babymaking part but how it all interacts, affects our lives...and maybe offers us different ideas about what makes a good or "productive" life?). So it's refreshing to see someone else talking about how very real this all is - we've just been trained not to notice it.