In which I’m going to go on and on about “women’s troubles,” so depending on who you are you may just want to stop reading right… about… HERE.

This morning I felt noticeably better than I did yesterday.

At first I attributed my calmness and clarity to my recent daily intake of Vata tea, but then The Curse™ arrived so I attributed my lack of misery to the fact that I was starting a new cycle.

Within two hours of the arrival of The Curse™ I had peed five times and probably weighed five pounds less. WATER RETENTION SUCKS, OMG, SO VERY MUCH. YOU CANNOT EVEN BELIEVE IT. Until it’s happened to you, it’s just one of those weird and stupid symptoms you only know about from Pamprin commercials. But until you yourself have gained twelve pounds in a mere two days, you simply have no idea what it feels like to suddenly wake up one morning in what is arguably the wrong damn body.

Every second or third cycle my body decides to bloat up, and for two weeks when I get out bed in the morning my feet feel like they’re going to split open when I step onto them. All my joints feel swollen and scratchy. I have to avoid salt, alcohol, and caffeine, and stay hydrated even though I’m already FULL OF WATER, because that’s what all the home care articles say to do… and I’m nothing if not dutiful when I’m verging on miserable.

And I am. Kinda miserable, I mean. During my luteal phase, at least. All my discomfort – the annoying tendency toward anxiety, those effing palpitations, and the damned stupid bloating – happens after ovulation. This makes no sense to me since the older I get the lower my progesterone levels are, but I’ve been charting long enough to know that it’s true: I hate my freakin’ luteal phase these days.

I feel fantastic the first half of my cycle – just fantastic! I have energy, I exercise, I start projects! I feel like myself. Then an egg no one even cares about explodes out of a follicle, and it’s all downhill from there: fatigue, lethargy, anxiety and panic and their attendant mild depression, water retention, and what has to be nothing other than dissassociation. I feel literally heavy: simply moving around is a chore.

And if that weren’t enough I’m far too inward, too: I more or less quit paying any kind of real attention to my environment and coast through on autopilot. I’m lucky that I’m smart or I’d have a hard time passing for normal. And I get so spaced out it’s amazing I don’t get hit by cars. I become absorbed with my thoughts and my internal bodily perceptions, and weirdly detached from the actual external world.

Maybe I feel better during the first half of my cycle because my estrogen is highest then? I don’t know. What I do know is that up to half my life these past two years since the PMS started in earnest is unacceptably blah, and there doesn’t really appear to be much I can do about it that I’m not already doing.

Please enjoy this totally unrelated
image of orange star-shaped lamps.

My diet is good. I quit smoking, I quit caffeine (well, mostly: I still eat chocolate). My alcohol consumption has lessened dramatically. I do my sun salutes. I walk every single day. I’m mindful of my sodium intake. I have a good attitude about my body. In short, I CAN’T TRY ANY HARDER WITHOUT BECOMING A RENUNCIATE.

And it keeps getting worse. Gah.

I’ve officially decided that I’m coming back male in my next life, and that’s all there is to it. I realize that males are simple creatures, many of whom can probably only perceive the middle range, but at least they don’t have to put up with the bewildering and fucked up “miracle” of female fertility. They appear to pretty much feel the same every day unless some outside force intrudes. Day after day! Consistently! And for that, I envy them. Lucky ducks.

Maybe being female is worth it if you actually use a female body for what it really does, but mine was pretty much bad out of the box. Apparently this body just doesn’t function that well reproductively, and I’m tired of having to live in it when it’s being stupid.

Female fertility is ineffably complicated. (It’s amazing people manage to get knocked up at all, really.) From menstruation through ovulation you’ve got your rising levels of estrogen and your follicle stimulating hormone. There’s your luteinizing hormone. There’s your testosterone and progesterone from ovulation through implantation. And several other hormones I can’t even remember, all doing an intricate, weaving dance in month-long cycles.

Frankly, it’s a mess.

And even if it mostly works (I do ovulate, for instance, have no luteal phase defect, and have been, for most of my fertile years, nice and regular with no pain or PMS whatsoever) it can still be just broken enough to cause quality-of-life-affecting symptoms like mine.

Actually, nothing’s “broken.” Not really. This is just what they call perimenopause. As a(n ex) smoker who has never delivered a baby, I am – hooray – statistically likely to begin perimenopause earlier and have more severe symptoms for longer. Go me.

And for some perspective: I’m not in pain, I’m not sick, nothing’s really wrong… it’s just that sometimes I don’t have any enthusiasm, I don’t feel engaged, and I don’t want to do anything. During those two weeks each month, my tiny life is almost unmanageably large, and all I do is live in my grandmother’s attic in a redneck town people only know of because its name is a joke! I have very little to accomplish, and I barely manage to get even that much done. Which sucks. And that’s what I’m bitching about, really.

I’m fairly certain that I had my first hot flash the night before last, in the evening, while sitting at the kitchen table. AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I’m beginning to suspect this is, if not just something really good to complain about, also a journey of surrender. As in, “Oh, yeah. Human body? Idiotic bag of fluid, amazing they work as well as they do, turns out I’ve located mySelf as an entity other than my wacky body after all. Lovely day then. Cheerio. And by the by, it turns out that Self transcends gender after all! Hah!”