Where I Stop

Yesterday started out bad when I was getting dressed in the morning, one eye on the clock and one eye on my substandard collection of warm socks, and I noticed that the pair of pants into which I was struggling was too tight. I used to need a belt to wear those pants. A belt pulled to its tightest-but-one notch. I pulled them on and looked down and realized I was, unbeknownst to me, five months pregnant. I had neither time nor pants enough to put on something more appropriate for my newfound maternal state, so I just pulled on a sweater and grabbed my keys and glasses and an octopus necklace and ran out the door to the bus, trying and failing to suck in my pudge.

All day I was in a foul mood, to the extent that I got a couple of “Are you…okay?” comments at work. I pushed my sweater sleeves up and noticed that they were leaving dents in my elbows. I couldn’t get comfortable no matter how I sat in my chair. I went to the gym and almost passed out on the elliptical machine, and later I wrote in my paper journal the following sentences: “I hate myself. I hate myself for hating myself. I also hate myself for hating the fact that I hate myself for hating myself.”  I had chocolate mousse cake for dessert, and when I came home I checked my pill pack, just to confirm my suspicions. Ladies and (the three) gentlemen (who read this), for the first time in about ten years, I have PMS.

I’m going off the pill. I’m currently on a low-dose prescription for a couple of months, and then I’ll be off completely in May. I’ve been wanting to get off for a while, since I’ve been on it for a long time and heaven knows I’m not using it for contraception at the moment. It just seems a little extraneous and we still don’t know all that much about long-term use, and my mom has had a couple of benign lumps removed, and so on and so forth. For the past six months or so I’ve been having weird mood swings the week before my period and I thought I was going crazy, because isn’t the whole point of being on the pill that your hormones are regulated so that you don’t have mood swings? I went on it when I was about nineteen not because of all the banging-till-the-break-of-dawn I was doing at the time, but because my periods were so crazy that I was having to take a day off every month to sit in the fetal position in the shower and pray for death to take me. I was already pretty emotionally unstable at the time so I don’t know if it made me any more so, although I do know it made my face instantly smooth and blemish free. That is a side effect I will miss dearly, because I know my real skin is lurking underneath, biding its time, waiting until I have a job interview or a hot date with Philip Seymour Hoffman to show its true pimply colors.

I guess the thing I really liked about it though was that everything was so predictable and that I never had to worry about my period. No cramps, no bloating, no nothing. I rigged it so I didn’t have to have it at Stupid Burning Man, because can you imagine? I got very used to taking my pills every evening and even got sort of used to the exponentially increasing cost of buying it over the years. It made it well-nigh impossible to lose weight, but have I mentioned the skin? Man, the skin was great. I liked thinking about my period as a minor annoyance as opposed to a big to-do, and I used to secretly scoff at women who would drag into work and be all “I am sooooo PMSing right now,” like, nice stereotype there, girl. I’d kind of raise my eyebrows and think haughtily to myself how pathetic it was that some women bought into the whole biology-is-destiny hormone thing.

If self-righteousness is a drug (and it is) then the principal withdrawal symptom is the shriveling sense of remorse you get when you experience the very thing you used to tsk about. (It’s even worse if you’ve done your eye-rolling in public). It turns out that I really hate that I have hormones at all, and that they can, apparently, affect not only my water retention rates but also my mood. I thought that was for other people, you see, not me. In social work school we learn that everything happens in a specific context, and that diagnosis of DSM disorders has to take environmental factors into account. When I was diagnosing I was always afraid of pathologizing people, and I would focus on trying to figure out what was going on in people’s external (i.e. non-hormone, non-neurotransmitter) lives when thought someone was depressed. I have always been a little wary of purely physiological reasons for anything,, now that I think about it, being pretty firmly on the nuture side of the whole nature/nuture debate. I even have a hard time even accepting that different people have different type of temperaments, and am constantly surprised when people behave differently than I do in a given situation, because I generally assume that people make specific choices about their behavior (in context, of course) and that my choices are the right and rational ones. A long time ago I was talking to a friend about our respective levels of…emotionality, I guess, is the word I want. She told me “It’s not that I don’t want to sit and talk to you for hours and hours about your problems…it’s that I can’t.” I was so hurt by that at the time. I was so sure that she could if she really wanted to, if she really cared about me. After all, I do that kind of thing all the time, how difficult can it be, right? 

And, as I think about it more, I have an even harder time with the idea that my body is more than just a suitcase for my brain on some level. Another friend once told me that I was the most comfortable in my body of anyone she knew, at which news I laughed and laughed, because it is so not true. I know that I have a body but I often have a hard time understanding that my body has anything to do with me, if that makes sense. Part of the reason I dance is to try to connect more with my body, to live more fully in it. My work has taught me that one of the many privileges that comes with not living with a chronic disease or disability is that very ability to divorce the self and the body, to not have to define yourself (and be defined by others) by your physicality, by your spine or stump or scars. I often wonder what it’s like for pregnant women, as they start to show. All of a sudden all eyes are on the belly, and complete strangers feel like they know something about you because of your shape and size and gestational capacity. I have had a infintisimally tiny taste of what that’s like in the past day or so, enough to make me realize that my body does more than move me from my bed to the bus and fill out my pants in an unflattering way.

It turns out that I too have hormones, female hormones at that, and that as I get away from regulating them pharmaceutically I am feeling the same effects that other women feel. It’s really strange to participate in my body’s chemistry this way; I have no idea what the non-pill me is going to be like.  I’ve gone a long time thinking that I didn’t really have a chemistry, that the course of my life is determined by completely external factors alone, so I sense it’s going to be a tricky balance in the months ahead, figuring out where I stop and my body, with its cycles and shifts and idiosyncrasies, begins.