I was scrolling, half numb, when I saw the line that finally made my brain short-circuit: “PMDD can cause symptoms that closely mimic hypoglycemia crashes.” Intense hunger. Dizziness. Shakiness. Sudden, violent mood swings that feel like the bottom dropping out of your body, and you don’t know if you need food or a priest.
I stared at those words and immediately thought of being twelve years old and fainting so hard I almost went through a window. One second I was upright; the next my vision tunneled and my knees just… stopped. I woke up on the floor with my head throbbing and everyone more annoyed than alarmed. “Drama.” “Probably didn’t eat enough.” “Stop being so sensitive.” No one said, “This sounds cyclical. Let’s look closer.”
Years later, terrified that something was secretly wrong with me, I took it upon myself to monitor my blood sugar during these episodes. I pricked my finger again and again, convinced I must be prediabetic, metabolically broken, or quietly dying. Every single time, the numbers came back normal. My body behaved exactly like it was crashing—shaking, dizzy, starving, panicked—while my glucose stayed in range. That gap between what I felt and what the lab said became another weapon used against me: if the numbers were fine, the problem had to be my mind.
Decades later, reading that sentence in a neat little summary, I realized: this wasn’t mysterious. This wasn’t rare. This was documented. And nobody thought to tell me. The rage that hit was not abstract. It was full-body, bone-deep, how-dare-you anger.
The Checklist That Read Like a Biography
Down the rabbit hole, I found one of those “risk factors for PMDD” lists. You know the type: soft colours, friendly icons, bullet points. Trauma. Chronic stress. Smoking. History of abuse. Other mental health conditions. I went down the list thinking, okay, let’s see how much of a stretch this is, and by the time I hit the bottom I realized I hadn’t skipped a single line. This wasn’t a risk profile; it was my life.
The implication landed hard and ugly: I didn’t suffer because I was uniquely broken. I suffered in ways medicine already recognizes—but chose not to act on. Over twenty years. The majority of my life so far. That time didn’t have to look like this.
“Depression” and “Anxiety” Are Not Single Symptoms
One of the most infuriating things about reading symptom lists now is the way umbrella states get treated as if they’re precise descriptions. “Depression.” “Anxiety.” “Irritability.” These are not symptoms; they are containers, and everything specific, physical, and actionable gets lost inside them.
When I was labeled “depressed,” what that actually meant was: my limbs felt like wet sandbags; my thoughts spiraled into graphic suicidal ideation; I went numb, then volatile, then numb again; my body felt like it was crashing even when my blood sugar was normal; light, sound, and touch became unbearable. When I was labeled “anxious,” it wasn’t nervousness. It was heart pounding, stomach flipping, skin crawling, the sense that something catastrophic was imminent—and internal. It was regular panic attacks, complete with hyperventilation that took me right to the edge of blacking out, while the people around me called me dramatic and psychotic, “faking it for attention,” even as I was starved for oxygen in a way no one could fake if they tried.
People love to judge what they’ve decided are someone else’s shortcomings and put on a show. What they forget is that the body and brain are very bad at pretending things that threaten survival. Even the best actor in the world can’t simply override the reflexes that keep them from actually suffocating.
So when “depression” and “anxiety” appear on PMDD symptom lists without explanation, what I see is not clarity but erasure. Once those labels were applied, my experience stopped being interpreted as information and started being treated as personality. The cyclical pattern disappeared under the flattening. I wasn’t confusing. I was mis-described.
Three Eras of Being Misread
When I look back, my life falls into three distinct eras. The suffering is consistent. The stories told about me are not.
Before TRT: “You’re Just Psycho.”
From the moment my cycle began, my life reorganized around a predictable disaster window. Every month, my system turned on me. Not “bad PMS,” not “moodiness.” I mean: I want to die and cannot make it stop. I shook. I got dizzy. I felt ravenous and nauseous at the same time. Sometimes I fainted. Sometimes I just sat there trying to keep myself intact.
I tracked glucose. I tracked sleep. I tracked food. Everything measurable said “normal,” which meant the conclusion was simple: I was the problem. Doctors shrugged. Family sighed. Peers rolled their eyes. Blood work: normal. Hormones: within range. Verdict: that’s just how you are. My body going feral once a month wasn’t treated as a medical pattern. It was treated as a moral failing.
On TRT: “You’re Calmer Now, But Now You’re Wrong.”
When my cycle stopped, the disaster stopped with it. No luteal free-fall. No cyclical self-destruction. The constant suicidal pressure dropped from a scream to background noise. It wasn’t perfection, but it was the first sustained relief I’d ever known. You would think that kind of change might inspire curiosity.
Instead, it inspired punishment. The narrative didn’t become, “Interesting—maybe the cycle was the issue.” It became, “This is politically unacceptable.” My stability wasn’t read as evidence; it was read as transgression. The suffering stopped being questioned. My existence did.
After Disruption: “You’re Psycho Again—and Now You’re a Problem.”
When other people interfered with my access to care, my cycle returned. So did everything else. The shaking, the dizziness, the hunger that felt like a crash even when labs stayed normal, the rage, the despair, the dysphoria spikes, the suicidal noise. This should have settled the question. Instead, the old script reappeared, now layered with open transphobia.
I wasn’t just “unstable” again; I was unstable and visibly wrong. The suffering didn’t change. The justification for hating me did.
Dysphoria as a Symptom, Not a Verdict
One of the most unsettling realizations in all of this is that dysphoria itself can be part of a PMDD symptom cluster. This is not an argument against trans people. It’s an argument for curiosity. My sense of self, my relationship to my body, my gendered distress—all of it spiked in the same window every month, long before I ever had language for any of it.
If someone had once said, “Some people’s sense of embodiment destabilizes cyclically. That doesn’t negate identity—it explains volatility,” my entire life might have unfolded differently. Instead, I was diagnosed by disgust. TRT didn’t prove who I was. It proved something simpler: when the cycle stopped, so did the chaos; when it returned, so did the suffering. The system cared more about policing meaning than understanding mechanism.
Hormones Are Not Gender Badges
At the root of all this is a lie so common we barely notice it: that estrogen and testosterone are only “sex hormones,” little gender flags for breasts and beards and libido. That framing is not just politically convenient; it is scientifically false.
These hormones regulate the brain, nervous system, metabolism, immune signaling, bone density, cardiovascular function, pain sensitivity, sleep, and mood. Sexual characteristics are one outcome among many—not the main event. When my body collapsed into monthly crises, no one asked how cyclical hormone shifts might be destabilizing my nervous system. When testosterone quieted that storm, it wasn’t treated as a medical clue. It was treated as a moral offense.
Now, watching subtle endocrine support calm suicidal pressure and restore basic bodily comfort, it’s impossible to pretend this was ever just about sex. Hormones do not care about culture wars. They do not care about ideology. They care about homeostasis. My body wasn’t having an identity crisis. It was having a regulatory one.
The Sick Joke of Late Relief
I’m using plant-based hormonal support now—carefully, attentively—and for the first time in years, my body is responding. The urge to die hasn’t vanished, but it’s quieter. My body no longer feels permanently shut down. Sensation, physical and emotional, is actually present again.
It’s early. I know that. But the fact that anything is shifting is enough to crack something open, because it means this was always moveable. When I read that PMDD typically presents with normal labs, everything snapped into focus. My glucose was normal. My hormones were “within range.” None of that prevented collapse. The problem was never missing data. It was selective attention. “Normal” labs were never meant to erase lived patterns, but they were used that way anyway.
This Is Not Placebo, and It’s Not Harmless Either
I want to be very clear about something before anyone rushes to file this under “placebo” or “harmless hippie remedies.” Using plant-based hormonal support instead of SSRIs or whatever else is currently fashionable in the prescriber’s toolkit is not about pretending herbs are softer, weaker, or magically risk-free. It’s about choosing a different set of levers in a body I know intimately, after being failed repeatedly by people who were supposed to be in charge of my care.
Plants are not gentle by default. They are pharmacology with leaves on. Chasteberry acts on dopamine receptors in the pituitary. Phytoestrogenic compounds bind receptors and alter signaling. These are real interventions. They can help and they can harm. “Natural” doesn’t mean safe any more than “pharmaceutical” means evil. The difference, for me, is who is steering and how honest we are about tradeoffs.
When I say I’m choosing this route, it’s not because I think SSRIs are fake or useless or because I believe my suffering should be managed with tea and positive thoughts. It’s because I have already been on the receiving end of doctors throwing heavy medications at me after ten-minute conversations, with no curiosity about my cycle, no meaningful testing, and no interest in my own knowledge of my body or my background in natural medicine and traditional practices. I have been dropped as a patient for refusing drugs that felt wrong and asking too many questions. I do not currently have a doctor, and I am not in that position by choice.
So when people ask, “Why not just take an SSRI?” as if I turned down a buffet of kind, careful options out of sheer stubbornness, I have to laugh. The system that is supposed to be offering those options has already shown me exactly how little it values my consent. My options have been: be sedated into compliance on someone else’s schedule, or be abandoned. I am choosing door three: learn, research, track, and intervene on my own terms with tools whose mechanisms I actually understand.
None of this makes what I’m doing risk-free. It makes it honest. I am not pretending that vitex and phytoestrogens are benign little mood stickers. I am saying: if something is going to alter my brain chemistry, my cycle, my tissues, and my risk profile, I want to be fully awake for that decision, not bullied into it and then blamed when it goes wrong. At this point, informed consent is not a form I sign in a waiting room. It’s a survival practice I apply to myself.
Who Actually Failed
It’s easy to internalize this kind of history and believe the story was always about personal weakness. It wasn’t. Medicine failed by treating numbers as truth and bodies as anecdotes. Families and peers failed by turning symptoms into moral judgments. Culture failed by pathologizing unruly bodies and politicizing care. None of this was inevitable. It was allowed.
What I’m Doing Now
I am not at peace with this story. I may never be. I am grieving decades that could have been safer, steadier, and less dangerous if someone had listened. I can’t recover that time, but I can refuse to let the narrative remain intact.
My body was never lying. It was speaking in a language no one bothered to learn.
If any of this sounds familiar, you are not making it up. If someone’s suffering is cyclical, severe, and persistent, “normal” labs are not a dismissal. I lost decades to a problem everyone swore didn’t exist. I can’t get that time back. But I can make damn sure the story doesn’t stay theirs.
What This Means for OVC
This isn’t just a private medical plot twist. It changes how I show up everywhere, including in the work I do through Ottawa Valley Creations. I’m not writing this as a detached retrospective from some imaginary “recovered” future; I’m writing it mid-course-correction, as someone finally treating a disorder that has quietly shaped my entire adult life.
OVC has always carried that, even before I had the language for it. My tone, my refusal to sugar-coat things, my obsession with naming reality as it is—those didn’t come out of nowhere. They came from spending decades being told my body was lying to me. When you’ve been dismissed that thoroughly, you either start gaslighting yourself or you decide you will never, ever do that to anyone else if you can help it. OVC exists firmly in the second camp.
It also means that when I talk about rest, pacing, sustainability, “doing what you can with the body you have,” I am not being metaphorical or on-trend. I am working around a nervous system that has been periodically set on fire by hormones and neglect. My business cannot be built on grind culture because my body literally cannot be built on grind culture. That’s not branding. That’s logistics.
Choosing plant-based endocrine support over a random prescription handed to me in a ten-minute appointment is part of the same ethic that runs through OVC: informed consent, transparency, and respect. I don’t romanticize herbs, just like I don’t romanticize handmade work or “small business hustle.” All of them can hurt you if you’re lied to about what they cost. What I want—in my body and in my work—is for the tradeoffs to be named honestly. If something is going to change you, you deserve to know how, and you deserve to decide whether that’s acceptable.
PMDD is not my brand. I’m not interested in turning a disorder into an aesthetic or a personality. But the fact that I lived untreated for twenty years, and that I am finally doing something about it now, is part of the ground OVC stands on. It’s why I will always side-eye systems that ask for quiet compliance and glossy gratitude. It’s why my writing will always lean toward “here is the truth as I know it” instead of “here is the version that sells best.”
What this means going forward is simple, even if living it isn’t: I am going to keep treating my body like it deserves care, and I am going to keep building OVC in a way that doesn’t require me—or anyone else—to pretend that pain is just a mindset problem. My hormones are not my identity, and my disorder is not my niche. But they are part of the story of how I got here, and they’re part of why I am determined that, in my little corner of the internet, when someone says “this hurts,” the first response is not “prove it.”
Support independent creativity through the Mutual Aid Fund or by exploring the Shop: Made by Me | Oddities & Convenience. If you’d like: you can follow us on Medium, itch.io, or on ko-fi as well.