Eleanor Morgan - Hysterical: Why We Need to Talk About Women, Hormones, and Mental Health

One day in our early lives as women, everything changes. we start bleeding. The beginning of our menstrual cycle, our fecundity, renders us different. In an instant were no longer children. I was on a crazy golf course overlooking Cromer Pier when I experienced period pain for the first time. It was the summer holidays, and Id started my period while away with my dad, brother, and sister just before my fourteenth birthday. Id taken to wearing my hair all scraped back, and my abundant forehead was absorbing the North Norfolk sun with vigor. As I stared between a pair of wooden clown lips to putt my ball between, my lower body rippled with new sensation. It was a pain that didnt fit inside my body. My pelvis hung suspended, like a bowling ball, threatening to burst from between my legs. That classic British coastal breeze perfume, thick with sun-roasted kelp and old deep-fat-fryer oil, took the nausea that seemed to come with these sharp churns to another level. I had to sit down on the grass. I thought, This is crazy.

Girls talked about period pain at school. Some fainted in class or on the benches next to the netball courts because of it. One girl vomited all over her desk in a math class and started crying before being led to the nurses office, the teachers hand gently holding the small of her back. These girls gained noble status. Their syncopes were crowns of maturity. To myself and others who hadnt yet started, they were kind of a different species because their bodies knew things ours didnt. We used to ask each other how bad it could be, us nonstarters, because we all knew what a stomachache felt like. But for a stomachache to have girls falling on their backs and puking into their pencil cases seemed wild.

Until I felt it.

This new pain burned through my thighs. My legs were like pipe cleaners as a teenager. That holiday they were so tanned they looked wood-stained. The blonde hairs on them caught in the light like fiberglass, and sitting on the grass, I wondered if I should start shaving above the knee (Mum had always said not to) as others did at school rather than stopping at the cap. My thighs carried on burning. I explained to Dad that I didnt feel well. He nodded and told me just to sit quietly. I was aware of the shift in his gaze toward me in a way that I absolutely did not have the language for. Only feeling.

Something set me apart from my younger sister. A vague sense of shame swam about me. A few days earlier, wed been in a four-man tent in Southwold, and Id been sat by the zipper feeling a peculiar nostalgia or longing that I couldnt place. I told myself I was homesick, even though home wasnt a particularly great place to be then. When we got to Cromer, I went to the toilet and found maturity in my knickers. An initial rush of excitementI could go back to school and be part of the in crowd! The swooning girls!gave way to a funny sadness. I had to leave the house immediately after telling Dad. It wasnt quite embarrassment that made me leg ithe did his best to make it a nonthing, a mini-celebration, evenbut in my core I felt uncomfortable. That whole holiday was one of heavy, wordless feelings.

I recall that afternoon on the golf course so clearly, I think, because the overwriting of what my body once knew as pain felt so significant at the time. The letters of the word, p, a, i, n, are symbols. Abstract. But there was a physiological process happening in my body and brain as they learned to accept this new state and its corresponding language. I began to embody the word differently. I had known pain before, of coursebroken fingers, headaches, tonsillitis, bruises, scratches, and bite marks from fighting with my siblings. This was different; it had texture. Emotion. I looked down at the grass and thought, for a split second, that it would never stop. That the pain was time itself.

Dad gave me the keys to go back to the house and take some ibuprofen. I made catlike sobbing noises the whole way. Back at the house, I lay on the sofa waiting for them to kick in. No one had mobile phones yet, so I couldnt relay my woes to any friends on WhatsApp. Anguished emojis were years and years away. It was so quiet in that moment, apart from the pitiful cawing of seagulls (why do they always sound so desperate?) overhead. Strangely, though, it wasnt lonely. The pain spoke to me. It told me my human fabric had changed. As evidence of the encoding that happened that day, now, on most occasions that I hear seagulls, I will have flash visions of lying on that sofa holding my young, tortured belly.

Im in my thirties now, and ever since my first period, theyve always been a slog. Ive had my own swooning and vomiting episodes as cramps ripped through my bodynot ever at school, but often in shopping centers. I learned to deal with what always used to seem to me like an excessive amount of blood, which came in a variety of colors and consistencies. As a teenager, when I was on (why did we say that? Upon what did we stand and then step off again?), Id be forever looking backward at myself in mirrors to check I hadnt leaked through my clothes: a steadfast paranoia that, although lessened, still lingers today.

I have spent quite some time now trying to gain autonomy over the way my hormones seem to make my mind and body behave each month. At some point in the last five years, as part of my ongoing quest for peace of mind after a confidence-obliterating breakdown of sorts forced me finally to seek help for the anxiety that I had done my very best to conceal from everyone around me, including myself, for well over a decade, I started thinking about my menstrual health as part of my mental health. It was after a particularly bad period buildup one month, which felt like a week of crying from nowhere, overeating, and spending too many evenings lying on my front in an existential torpor, that I went to my GP. I asked her if this could really just be premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

Before the appointment I had somehow had the common sense to start making a monthly diary (read: a series of symbols Sharpied on the Cliff Richard calendar my best friend bought me) and realized that this way of being and feeling crept up on me every couple of weeks for a few days at a time. Notably, after my period, Id have a week of feeling