This strange way of life.

I have found the weeks going by like I am living through a cycle. There is very little to break up each day, let alone each weekend. I know that this is a temporary lifestyle for me. I know that very soon there will be new places to go, new people to meet. I have realised that these are the fundamentals for feeling renewed and alive. 

When this pandemic is over, in whichever way it will end, I don't think I am going to sit still for very long ever again. I enjoy puttering about the house, being quiet and still for a few hours, taking in a slower pace of life. But when it is enforced, when it is for the sake of everyone's health to reduce your entire life to a small bubble of places and people, it is like living in some version of Groundhog Day, The Truman Show and somebody playing The Sims all mixed into one. 

I am surprised every time the night comes along because it felt like no time at all. I get confused as to what happened (not a lot) on which days and how much time has passed since the week began. My heart sinks when I'm reminded how many weeks and days and hours have been and gone since lockdown began in March. 

Even so, I have very little to complain about. I have a job, I have a beautiful home, I have a close family who I only want to kill about once a week. I have my garden, I have the local common to meet friends at and drink pints from the pub, I have my neighbours who have plied me with wine every time I knock on their door on a Thursday or Friday evening, and their children who have spent Saturday mornings with me doing crafts. All of these things in themselves have become part of the routine. The light relief, the escapism itself, has been swallowed into the repetitiveness of our current daily lives. This is not to say that I don't love all of these things, that I am not deeply grateful, but when I imagined being twenty-two, so young and carefree, this way of life was not in the picture. 

I suppose this is a way of airing my grievances, of which there are very few legitimate complaints, but I am also still surprised when I think about what we are living through. Every single person around the world has had their lives changed in some way, big or small, at pretty much the same time because of a shared human problem. It feels enormous and strange and scary and almost inconceivable all at once. I have adapted to a different way of life, and I have become used to it, but I don't know when it will stop feeling weird. 

My body and my mind.

I have always known that my mind was closely interlinked with my body. We often separate the two in their own rights, forgetting that every though and feeling coming out of your brain is as much a biological process as the heart pumping blood up and down arteries and veins. We think of thought and goings on of the mind as ethereal, unknown entities separate from any physical matter. But every thought and every feeling we ever have comes out of a lump of biological material sitting inside our skulls.

When I was younger I engaged in a type of therapy called Mickel Therapy. I was taught to recognise every physical symptom such as nausea or stomach ache or fatigue and link it back to an event in the day which may have caused my body stress. Everything my body did was connected to something going on in my brain. I was not suffering from a purely psychosomatic illness, but my body and my brain were sending messages to each other in response to certain things throughout each day which resulted in physical illness and exhaustion. This therapy changed my life and made me better.

I am pretty sure I have experienced PMS every month since my first ever period at the age of 11. It got so bad when I was 17 that I felt severely depressed every time my period was about to happen. I went on the combined pill to help regulate my hormones and for a long time this helped me feel better during my cycle. It helped so much that often I didn't really notice symptoms of PMS at all, apart from feeling a bit more stressed or down or confused a few days a month. What has fascinated me over the last few months where I have been experiencing a lot of emotional stress and grief is how much it has heightened my awareness of my hormonal cycles.

I hadn't paid much attention to the emotional part of the monthly cycle apart from feeling rubbish during PMS. I listened to a podcast with comedian Aisling Bea (it was an episode of Jameela Jamil's I Weigh, for anyone who's interested) where she talked about period shame. She spoke about the fact that researching the effect that the menstrual cycle has on her body throughout the entire month, not just the week and a bit at the end of each one, has changed her life for the better. Before this I had never heard of the 'rise' phase or the 'shift' phase. I knew vaguely that ovulation happened somewhere in between but never considered the effect of hormones in that particular process.

I have learnt that during the 'rise' phase I feel absolutely amazing. I feel positive about everything going on in my life, I feel that I can manage anything that comes my way, the future looks bright, the sun seems to be always shining. I now know that this switches in the course of 24 hours when I enter the 'shift' phase and I become gradually more upset, exhausted and unable to deal with anything emotionally right through to when I get my period.

Weirdly, I have been able to monitor this closely due to the emotional impact of a breakup. If I feel generally okay about the situation and able to focus on moving on, I know that I am in the height of my 'rise' phase. When, and it can be literally the next day, I suddenly feel deeply upset about the whole thing and like the sadness will never end I know that I have started my PMS.

This has helped me to understand my body and my emotions even better than I did before. It has helped to know that even when I do feel catastrophically upset everything will improve dramatically in the next week. It has helped me to forgive myself when I suddenly feel like any emotional progress I have made is erased during the height of my PMS, because I can now understand it as a completely natural, intrinsically physical experience and not something that I have made up in my head.

Living in any body is a privileged, unique experience, particularly when you have a very healthy one. Understanding that everything my mind and body does is an interlinked, biological experience both makes me appreciate my corporeal vessel even more and allows for greater mental health. This doesn't mean feeling on top of the world every second of every day, but it does help in not beating yourself up for those inherently human, completely natural and forgivable moments or days of feeling  less than okay.

It is also important to add that, for anyone who has a menstrual cycle, every single experience is different and getting to know your own quirks and tendencies is a healthy process. As a bonus, it is also a step towards smashing that socially accepted shame surrounding the daily physical and emotional experience of over half of the world's population.