“Is it a lack of serotonin or is my life shit?” This is what many people with cycles ask themselves. This has to do with repressing the symptoms of PM(D)S.
Time to tear out your hair: Is it because of the hormones? Photo: Torsten Becker/imago
It is creepy. Despite the cycle applications, despite so much accumulated knowledge about PM(D)S, adorned with great experience, I think again with each cycle: it has rarely been this bad. This isn't just PM(D)S, it's my life that sucks. I'm basically gaslighting myself.
My cycle is not entirely regular, which means that from time to time the constant mental stress starts earlier and that in turn makes it difficult for me to categorize it. Is it really hormonal? Do I hate my life because my brain doesn't receive enough serotonin or is it that with my resilience and sadness it is a part of me from now on, like my cellulite?
Even when my cycle is on time, when the gray clouds appear on my app that want to tell me: take out the umbrella, it's time to cry. They assure me that it is a lack of serotonin and not life itself. Even then, I often doubt I ever felt despair, sadness, anger, and self-pity so intensely.
What kind of trick is your brain playing on you?
My friend S. and I exchanged many voice messages. When she starts her PM(D)S, I can hear it in the tone of her voice. Her normally calm and rather soft voice then vibrates. As if the aggression provoked by the PM (D) S had settled comfortably in her vocal cords. This time she was honored with a symbol. When she came home from the supermarket, already nervous and exhausted, and unpacked the groceries, she found milk, vegetables, chocolate and cat food, as well as worms. If her serotonin-depleted brain was the straw that broke the camel's back, the worms were the straw that broke the camel's back.
Sadness, anger, aggression, envy, despair.
“Believe me Sarah, I've never had PMS this bad, I can feel it. My life, it's the worms. “What I touch rots, what I try fails, what I feel kills me.” This time I was in the role of observer. His voicemail came to me around the time of ovulation. There I am – as far as possible given my strange personality – at my center. Around ovulation I know that feelings come and go. Nothing remains as beautiful and nothing remains as terrible as it seems in the hours of light and darkness.
But two weeks later, there is little left of this reflected person. Everything is in motion. My feelings are a statue, formed by sadness, anger, aggression, envy, despair, suspicion.
How can it be? Does it have to do with repression? Is this coping mechanism unfairly frowned upon? Probably.
The conviction renewed each month that I have never before been at the mercy of my feelings so intensely reminds me of the Christmas paradox. That's what I call the phenomenon of spending Christmas with your family, even though every year you swear: “This is the last time, make your sexist jokes without me, comment on my body behind my back from now on, destroy yourself in my absence.” Only to, thanks to repression, sit around a table again the following year with the same people and the same conviction, which is: “It has never been this bad.”