My initiation into womanhood was not an easy one. In fact, it was brutal.

My first ever period, on my eleventh birthday, had me fainting in class and screaming at the receptionist in school that ‘I wasn’t being dramatic, I was actually dying’. Bleeding through my school trousers that I was literally leaving a blood trail. So, they were never easy! Then a continuous cycle of cramps, crying and rage that seemed to permeate my life every month. My memories of those times are mostly rolling around on the floor and crying, begging for any kind of release. My mother took me to the doctors, and I was put on the contraceptive pill, which unbeknownst to me, would change my whole life. Then, I was expected to grin and bear it. Even though I was still bleeding through my pants every few weeks. My whole life felt upside down.

I always have and will continue to find it interesting that society instils into us that our cycles are something to ‘push through’ or ‘overcome’, or the very worst ‘not to be discussed’. I used to think it was absolutely bonkers that over half of us in my school were bleeding at some point in time and yet it was never, ever discussed.

All us girls, raging, crying and sometimes even fighting with one another, and no thought was given to help us figure out why. Even our teachers, going through their own cycles, never discussed it with us. Never sat us down and told us, we were all about to become little women, our lives changed forever. I guess it all eventually added up to why I didn’t figure out what was going on within me for so long. Why there is so much unsaid in womanhood. So much shame and secrecy.

Then the abuse started happening. And it just added to the things left unsaid. How could I talk of that when even bringing up pads was taboo? When I look back on like 11-year-old Beth, my heart, and womb genuinely bleed for her.

In my 20’s, things took a real turn, I came off the pill and everything came raging, and I mean RAGING back. I was angry at the world, at my partner, and at myself. I would go from enjoying life, working as a yoga teacher, travelling the world at the time- to the light going out from the world, losing all love and hope in the things that brought me joy and feeling like I’d genuinely lost my damn mind. My mind would take me to the absolute depths, suicidal thoughts, thought of ending it all…

My partner of 4 years couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand it. So, I began to keep a journal. And then it happened.

Two years ago, I got diagnosed with PMDD. After charting my ‘blue days’ for months in my journal, and finally figuring out the clear pattern- I headed to the doctor with the stone-cold proof that there was a genuine tendency to burn my life down, on repeat, every month.

They of course offered me the contraceptive pill, which as mentioned earlier actually screwed my life up. I’m infertile from never having the proper time to develop my natural cycle, and I learned it was only a masking of symptoms, which after years of shame- I was not prepared to go through. Ever again. So, after being given no advice, no care, no understanding – I was once again, left to my own devices.

I self-medicated, by smoking weed. I had done this since my early teenage years to mask my raging ADHD and trauma, and now it helped with the ever-growing rages that I was witnessing every month. But it was also desensitizing me- It was making me lethargic and all the easier to slip into the comfort blanket of dissociation- of feeling nothing rather than anything at all.

So, I embarked on a new journey. As a holistic practitioner, I turned to my practices for help. Not the conventional yoga, which is based on men’s bodies (surprise surprise) but to somatics. To dropping into the ever-changing inner seasons of my body and trying to learn what they were teaching me. I discovered, through practice and research, how consistent my changes in my body were. I went through an inner winter at menstruation, where I wanted to hide from the world and rest. An inner autumn at Luteal, where I was peak PMDD, rageful, vengeful or contemplative. An inner spring at follicular, where I could begin to feel the energy rise, to an inner summer at ovulation, where everything was possible.

And so, I started to create practices and learn to drop into my body at these times, especially the challenging ones, autumn and winter. I cleared my social calendar, batched cooked meals, and cleaned my home in preparation. When the rage or shame would inevitably hit, I would sit with myself, or journal- what was I actually experiencing here? Where am I experiencing it in my body? What can I do, in this very moment, to make myself feel better?

As little as this practice may sound, it was revelational- I managed to quit the addiction, to work with cycle instead of against it- rather than to dread it and fear it I was asking it- what do you want from me?

Mostly, it was space and acceptance. Or it was solitude and rest. I was a cuddle and a meal cooked by my partner fed to me in the bath (yeah, I know). Or chocolate.

Over time, with consistency (because nothing worth having comes easy) I have genuinely changed the way I view my cycle, I still get rageful and feel like the world is caving in- but I can take a moment to understand that what is going on within me is always an indicator of something- that I’m either denying in my body- through constantly pushing it when it needs to rest- or denying my mind- pushing away something that needs my attention, that feels uncomfortable to face.

That and I welcome my bleed like an old friend now. I try to treat her with kindness and gratitude as she is an indicator, a deep inner knowing. That I bleed on a cycle that links the moon, the seasons of the year- even the times of day. That it reminds me, each month where I have overstretched, where I have thrived, and welcomes me back into the arms of mother nature every time.

It may seem like a far stretch, and you may read this and this ‘ppfffff, bloody hippy, she doesn’t have PMDD, its not as bad as mind etc etc etc’ But I ask you, truly- what have you got to lose by trying?

Beth is a 31 year old yoga and breathwork teacher who has been battling with PMDD, struggling to get a diagnosis until last year, she has kindly shared her PMDD experience with us.

With each passing menstrual cycle...

With each passing menstrual cycle, the more at peace I become with my decision to have my reproductive organs removed. Being under thirty, from the outside looking in, it might seem like an insane decision, but for those who live with the agony of PMDD each month, for many of us, it is the most sane decision we have ever made. For the past decade of my life, I have felt as though I am out in the middle of the ocean drowning, and as I look to shore, I see everyone living their normal lives, nothing I want more, but every time I garner up enough strength to swim to shore, a giant red wave that is PMDD comes crashing down and washes me back out to sea. I scream for help, but nobody knows what to do, so they go back to living their lives on land. When you have a chronic invisible illness, the isolation is debilitating, and when you look well enough to live a normal life but are not actually well enough to do so, you have to become real comfortable with who you are and how you conduct your life; despite the crippling shame which accompanies PMDD. After years of feeling like an anomaly to the medical community, having this surgery gives me a sense of power in taking my life back. And after years of allowing others to have input on my body without ever asking me what is actually going on with my body. However, if it were not for the bravery of the PMDD warriors who fought this battle before me, I would not have the knowledge, courage, or understanding to do so. I forever salute you.

Sydney Herrera is a writer and dog mom living in Los Angeles

This Undue Burden

There is an unopened pill bottle that hasn’t seen the light of day, or yellow apartment lighting, since it first got stuffed into the trademark brown paper prescription bag from CVS pharmacy. 

“It’s worrying that you’ve been experiencing this on your own for a year and haven’t come in earlier,” the gynecologist expresses, with a look of something between disappointment and pity. I don’t tell her about the time a different gynecologist gasped from in between my legs as I lay staring at the grey speckled drop ceiling tiles, clutching my stabbing-pain lower abdomen. That day, we both discovered that my IUD had fallen out of place. There’s another, more unplaceable kind of pain that happens when you’re forced into vulnerability due to a lack of knowledge about something so intimate. I felt that, too. 

I didn’t tell her about the time the gynecologist before that failed to warn me how painful IUD insertion was, meaning I failed to plan ahead and ask someone for a ride, and was forced to take two buses and a subway home. Nor about the time another gynecologist inserted the subzero speculum into my vagina with zero warning, triggering SA memories. Nor all the other times I left crying from gynecologists’ offices all over the city. Creating my own wayward constellation of sites of trauma. 

All I could get out in response was a tearful nod. The doctor proceeded to tell me about my array of options. Two in total. I could either take a birth control pill daily at a low enough dosage that it wouldn’t serve as contraception—which seemed illogical given that there was already a copper letter T in my uterus (yes, I had one reinserted after the first mishap)—or get on an antidepressant. Oh, and I had to decide right then and there. 

So, I paid to get prescribed a medication that sits untouched in a corner of my home. Out of the glorious pregnancy prevention menu options, I had chosen the Paragard IUD because it was non-hormonal. Although researchers are still unsure of the exact causes of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), they believe it is caused by (depending what website you read it on) a “negative,” “abnormal,” or on the kinder and more people-centric webpages, “very sensitive,” response to ‘normal’ hormone level changes brought about by the monthly menstrual cycle. Back in 2021, the NIH released an article titled, “To Normalize is to Impose a Requirement on an Existence.” We are required to go about our daily lives uninterrupted, even as we undergo physically and emotionally taxing bodily changes because they are deemed normal; menstruating bodies are forced to work their 9-5s, sit through classes as their uterine lining seemingly vengefully sheds, and perhaps worst of all, socialize while holding back grimaces and doing the mental math of how many days are left in their cycle.

With PMDD, I am required to move through the world as if I didn’t just leave my body in a dissociative fog in a desperate effort to distance myself from the foreign version of me I become the days right before my period. Each month, it’s not so much a wanting to forget as it is a wanting to believe I’ll be able to see it coming and stop it in its tracks before it gets a hold on me. You don’t know you’re in it until you are. The rage enters like a poisonous gas and I wish I knew how to craft a gas mask for my partner, or at the very least a warning sign. The irritability is a thousand fire ants crawling on my skin that I can’t swat away. The depression is a plunge into the darkest, most soundless depths of the sea. Soundless because I can’t hear myself spiral, let alone think. Soundless because it is one of the only times in my life I can’t find the right words to save me. 

Growing up in an immigrant household meant many things, but chief of all was a great level of suspicion and wariness of Western medicine. I felt most healed when my grandparents practiced their indigenous cleansing rituals on me. At the slightest stomach ache, my grandfather was rubbing an egg across my body and enveloping me in smoke, uttering hushed prayers as he did so. We’re hundreds of miles apart now. I try to do limpias on my own but the protection only lasts so long before the stresses, anxieties, and responsibilities of working two jobs, being in school, being a good partner, and so much more take back over my mind. And body. Stigmatization and medical mistrust run rampant in plenty communities of colour, understandably so given the history of forced experimentation, unconsented operations, and other forms of discrimination. I understand all too well the reasons behind my internal turmoil over whether or not to take this antidepressant, but understanding isn’t always sufficient remedy. The diagnosis alone has helped me immensely in terms of feeling the slightest bit seen and affirmed in my experience. A true remedy, however, would be providing accommodations in school and workplaces for menstruating bodies, and in a way that doesn’t lead to backlash or punitive measures. Instead, upon submitting a request for work accommodations based on PMDD falling under ADA protections, I was told that I would only receive accommodations “if the request does not create an undue burden on other staff/the organization.” 

It is a miracle that I am still here, navigating life, carrying the undue burden of a dysphoric disorder. I don’t use the word “miracle” lightly, for the suicidal ideation and depression that come with PMDD are debilitating and all-consuming in a way I never thought my well of emotions could ever be. I know the antidepressants are perhaps the best choice, but they still sit in their brown paper bag for now, for just a bit longer, I’m telling myself. The gynecologist mentioned that PMDD isn’t permanent, that perhaps it’s reared its head because this particular stage of my life has an inordinate amount of external stresses pushing down on me. I’m holding out hope because it’s what I’ve always held onto, and because I know I’m worth it. I’m worth hoping better for.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media community artist, and youth arts educator from

Bronx, NY. Their writing and artistry are rooted in radical love and an anticolonial poetics, asking

readers and viewers to come close, both in physical touch and in heart. Their writing dares to ask,

“Who are we at our most free?” Their peoples are from Mexico and Dominican Republic.