#i sure fucking hope i just have pmdd or something and i’ll be ok in a week but i really get so fucked up whenevrr.. you know and like. well

[pepprs]

straight up haven’t done homework in like 2 weeks (and then 2 weeks before that too) and I know i need to do it right this second i can’t afford to not do anything but i can’t even move off the ground rn mentally or physically. god fucking help me

[nihilisme]

y’all know what time it is. i can’t sleep so i’m gonna write

I talk about some pretty heavy shit later on - so don’t read if you get triggered by sexual assault/rape/abuse etc.

It’s nearing my period and every time it’s close to my period, my PMDD symptoms flare up. For those who don’t know, it’s PMS pumped to the max. You have extremely horrible thoughts, yes, at times, suicidal - you feel incredibly hopeless, and it’s basically just this guaranteed time slot every month of where you will feel like utter, utter shit. Without fail.

Funny enough I’ve never noticed that the horrible feelings are a recurring cycle until I met my current boyfriend. And to my horror, I realized my mom had been dealing with this for years. She’d have horrible fits of rage during this time, and I honestly feel so bad that her husband didn’t care enough, and was too stupid, to get her proper help. Yeah she’s fucking difficult. But if you enable abusive behavior you’re as bad as the abuser.

Never mind my mom at this point. But the PMDD symptoms are incredibly lessened when I am on birth control. I suspect if I were on other medications it would lessen the symptoms more, but birth control fucks with me enough already that I don’t feel comfortable taking other meds.

And yet I still cried so hard yesterday knowing that one of my friends is hanging out with somebody I had a relationship fallout with. It’s like - you can’t make everyone like you, I know that. And I am in pretty healthy relationships with other people. AND on top of that - I know that I’ve been relentlessly working on improving myself, really fighting very hard to not let my bad thoughts control my life.

I’ve been living in this constant limbo of working on myself, applying healthy coping skills, and improving throughout the month - and then hitting that period of PMDD and feeling like all I worked was for nothing. Like, it does get better on the long run - but the dips can be as debilitating as they are discouraging. It is... harrowing to describe how suicidal I can get during PMDD. And the worst part is, for many years, the feelings just made sense. And even yesterday, and now, the feelings make sense because I do have low self esteem still, something I work really hard on fixing every day.

Being a woman is hell, honestly. I’ve been constantly hounded and accosted for sex since I was 14. Part of it because my abusive relationship with my parents led me into chasing boyfriends at an early age - to replace my dysfunctional relationship with what I hoped would more stable - WITHOUT EVEN REALIZING I WAS DOING IT. Because I was a child. Just wanting stable, reliable affection lol.

I was raped when I was 18. When I confessed what happened to my parents, my dad told me I was asking for it because of what I was wearing. Because I was in his room - even though at that point, we’d been going out for 8 months. And I drew my boundaries clearly. I didn’t want to have sex. I gave him everything else. I basically let him use my body the way he wanted - because I thought if I let a man use my body, my emotional needs wouldn’t be too much. I thought it was a fair exchange, because at that point I hadn’t realized that being in a relationship wasn’t a fucking business deal. Because that’s all I’d been taught.

Even before that relationship all a guy wanted from me in the end was sex. And they were teenage boys - sure. It’s mostly hormones at that point. But I remember my second boyfriend spreading rumors in high school that I was a prude because I refused to have sex with him lol.

In college, I had a grad TA I worked under who would make me do all his work because I was a woman. This isn’t conjecture - he literally said it was a woman’s work to do the “admin” work. AKA - GRADING ENGINEERING PAPERS. WITH PHYSICS, CALCULUS, AND OTHER ENGINEERING SUBJECTS (this was an intro engineering class, it had all the flavors of engineering subjects thrown in). You’re really gonna sit here and tell me the subject of physics is just administrative work to grade. Ok pal. What the fuck ever.

I met another professor in college, when I was doing my final engineering project - it was a data science project, and at that point it was early on before Data Science was a big buzzword. So being seniors in college who were engineering students but not exactly comp sci students (hard to explain) we decided to go to an expert to help get us started. I went with a white guy with whom I was pretty friendly, acquainted with at the time. And then when we met this professor - he basically ripped me a new asshole because I wasn’t “prepared”. And he only yelled at me, and not the guy I was with. “Why are you even asking me such basic questions? Why are you not prepared?” But literally only directing those questions at me, the brown girl in the room. NONE of the hostility at the white guy.

I have other stories. Especially at my last work place - but there’s just a myriad of it and I kind of want to get back to the meat of my story again.

Realizing I have PMDD has just been the icing on the cake on the experience of being a woman tbh. On top of the emotional abuse I experienced my entire life, sexual abuse I faced when I was 18, the struggle of getting through an engineering degree, knowing that every month my struggles basically reset is kind of... wow. It’s almost too much honestly. Idk how I’ve been holding on all this time.

And maybe this is the time I should toot my horn, for the sake of my sanity. I’ve had some pretty cool jobs since I graduated college. Like, the type of jobs that make people IRL go, Wow, when I talk about it. The prestige that comes with it, I won’t lie, is like a straight shot of crack to the brain. I’ve never done crack so I’m sure that was 100% completely scientifically accurate.

But truly, I do wonder how the fuck I’ve made it through all of this. I’ve made it through all of it and I’ve thrived. And on top of it all - I am so thankful for my loving boyfriend who consistently shows me love. I love him so much. It’s easy to take things for granted now, when I feel more stable. Because when I don’t I feel like it’s literally magma trying to escape my pores. The anger, the horrible feelings, are crazy. Are too much.

I need to write about this shit to remind myself what I’ve gone through and what I’ve overcome. And I’ll keep accomplishing things, even when there are times when I don’t feel that way at all. When I feel like things are crumbling around me and it feels like nothing will heal, and nothing will get fixed.

They will if I just ride the feelings out, and know that it is my PMDD. As shitty and horrible as I feel, I know it’s the PMDD. And when I finally bleed, the feeling will pass. And then the cramps will begin lol.