PMS: Natural Disaster or Emotional Compass?
I’m generally a pretty easygoing person. My keel is more even than not, but a few times per year, I become pre-menstrually crazy. Now I’m just emerging from one such week of crazy, so perhaps my perspective is still hormonally addled, but I’m beginning to think that I would prefer to have the crazy come every month, and in the exact same form, just so I wouldn’t be so blindsided when it does show up.
My crazy is never predictable in content or duration. I’ve come to liken the different incarnations to natural disasters. Allow me to elaborate:
The Tsunami: The crazy washes in unexpectedly, bats me around in a sea of hormones and emotional debris. The “red tide” signals it’s departure, and the crazy leaves just as quickly as it came in. The Tsunami is mercifully brief, though it wreaks a good deal of havoc during it’s 8-12 hours of tossing me about.
The Earthquake: This version is probably my preference if I have to have the crazy. It manifests as a single, sudden freakout/angry outburst/tearful exchange. There are occasionally emotional aftershocks, but if I’m graced with any degree of self-awareness, I can sidestep the worst of it.
The weeklong blizzard: Also known as “the storm of the century.” Happily, these are rare for me. Sadly, I just came out of one and will be sorting through the emotional precipitation for quite some time. I get to be a detached observer in this type of crazy. I know I have PMS, I know my hormones are contributing to my disproportionate reactions. What I realized this go round was that the issues that come up during the week are not manufactured. They’re real, unresolved issues that don’t hinder me in the day to day, but stop me cold when PMS forces me to take a hard look at them. To carry on my lame metaphor, it’s not as if the emotional baggage, or “snow” isn’t there when I don’t have PMS, it’s that I can’t see it when I don’t have PMS.
So tonight, when I get home from my office job, I’m going to try to process what came up for me this month: I’m no longer getting much out of one of my friendships, and I want more sex. Could I possibly turn PMS into a tool for personal growth? A compass for the issues in my life that need tackling? Yay!
Of course, I suppose its easy to hypothesize that PMS is a blessing when I’ve just come out the other end.
Apologies for the mixed metaphors and other stylistic gaffes–I still have hormone brain this morning. For fine PMS blogging, please see the Bunny:
I think she used to have several other PMS pieces, but those may have been pulled to put in her book.
March 8, 2007 at 12:30 pm
[...] does the time go? It seemed like only days ago I was writing about PMS and yet my fledgling attempts at self-awareness indicate that its back. The rest of the week [...]