Blaugust #7: Menopause Saved My Life
Menopause saved my life.
I'm kind of tired of writing about my suicidal ideation, but even when I have moved past it, it still feels like shelter. Like without being suicidal, I am exposed to the cold and the elements and the wildlife, and it is wanting to extinguish myself that lights the warming fire and fills the belly and shrouds me in safety. I am trying to figure out who I am without that cushion to fall back on--the idea that nothing matters because I'm going to kill myself eventually anyways. I'm trying to figure out who I am without suicidal ideation wrapped around the brainstem like holiday lights. It's really fucking hard.
Because for so long suicide was another membrane, the greatest of barriers, enveloping my body in thick gross jelly, encasing me in sacs of stinging liquid and lurching thorns and only letting the horrors pass through. When we first moved to our house in Michigan there was a hornet's nest in the front pine, hanging down over weeping emerald, gray hard matter spitting out buzzing creatures the color of worst degree burns & the sun when viewed at too close a distance; my nana is allergic to bees so we had to get it removed. Just took their home away. I guess they die in winter anyway and it was late October so it probably made no real difference, but I didn't know that back then. I still pitied the colony when we had to call the guy in. I felt then that the hornets, even with the danger they posed, probably deserved a space on that lot more than I did. In a way I view eliminating my suicidal ideation similarly to the nest; removing it was only beneficial, but I still missed the bad thing anyway. Isn't that silly? It's like kissing your cancer. But suicide was also the nest I resided in and the queen I served. It is what hatched the me that exists now. It was the purpose of the honeyart I produced, the nectarcreativity I engorged myself on in order to keep the colony growing. Suicide was all of my purposes. I was in love with suicide.
But now I’m not. It’s all due to menopause.
I got my period when I was about to turn eleven, and my mom was at a doctor’s appointment with my grandmother, so the only person home to guide me was my father, and my father was clueless and selfish and and and and. His only advice was to shove a pad at me, give vague directions as to how to put it on, and tell me to talk to my mom when she got home. Then he went back to playing BZ Flag. I was angry at his lack of effort at the time and I am even angrier now. But my life changed at the beginning of my menstrual cycle—-and not in the way people typically mean when they say that.
I’ve dealt with severe depression and anger my entire life, but it got significantly worse after my period began. That very next year was my first suicide attempt. I went from neutralsad all the time with occasional fits of fury to being suicidal and furious at all times for half of the month, then better when my period began and shortly after it stopped, then it would repeat the next month, and so on. My body began to shuffle itself around. My body caved in on itself.
They tried every medication they could for me. Max dose lithium at the age of 12. Every damn SSRI on the market in the US. Trintellix. Cymbalta. I responded to none of it, the lithium killed my thyroid dead, and I kept coming close to attempting suicide (or actually attempting suicide) every month. I’ve attempted for real about ten times, but I’ve been close to attempting countless, countless times. I don’t remember a time before this past month where I wasn’t having a situationship with suicide. Paradoxically the only thing that kept me going was the idea that I could tap out at any moment, but I found a way to stop myself most of the time.
The barrier? My love for my mother. The knowledge that she had suffered so much and my death would only create more suffering. The specter-strong, omnipotent knowledge that no one in my family has ever, without exaggeration, had freedom. We just get abused and we get abused and then our abusers die and leave us as little husks of people and then we ourselves die too, still little and huskish. We just get abused and die. But my living family’s abusers are all dead now. We survived. We made it. It doesn’t feel like we made it. It doesn’t feel like we made anything. We’re still anchored there; how can we not be? So, as long as my mother was still reliant on me, I would try my best to keep my head above water. Sometimes I went under but the Light reached Their callused palms into the muck and ripped me right back out, like placing a board game piece two steps backward, two steps forward, one hop this time. Spin the wheel and see what it lands on. I have always been determined to break the cycle but mostly I have just been determined to die and I haven’t actually spun the big divination card wheel of fortune yet. I have moved past the determination and now I’m trying to get rid of the dying. I had to learn about PMDD through a Tumblr post, and that's the big medicinal cherry on top; the very site that ruined my life also, in a way, saved it.
I was 20 when I got diagnosed. At first they put me on Yaz to stop my periods, but every person in my dad's family died from a blood clot and, though I tested negative for clotting disorders, I did not want to end up the same way. I also identified as a transgender man at the time; the person that inhabited my body back then was a man, but the person that inhabits this body now is not. I don't remember what the reason was for the change other than maybe the part of me that was a man decided to pack all its shit up in a bindle and take a hike into the mountainside of my inner world. Maybe he even died out there. I don't know. But the reasons to have a hysterectomy felt clear: I was a man, I suffered from severe PMDD, and birth control was too dangerous for me. I had always, always wanted children, and even planned to have some very young when I was in a particularly bad bout of psychosis and thought I wasn't mentally ill at all whatsoever and could handle it, but I was unaware that my uterus was severely underdeveloped; I only found that out during pre-surgery ultrasounds. If I had gone through with my plan of turkey bastering myself and it had worked, only God knows what would've happened. I don't think it would have been good.
Though the surgery was supposed to be for PMDD, they gave me the option to keep one ovary in, explaining to me that recent science indicated removal of both ovaries shortened the lifespan. They did not explain that the production of estrogen in the ovary is what causes PMDD, and that the only surgical way to treat it is by removing the entire reproductive system. I went through invasive surgery, my guts and vagina sliced open by an icy mechanical arm and sucked out, my other innards shifting around their new gape and hollowness —I imagined them getting a dog now that they had the space for it, always joked I’d put a DVD player in there. I was forced to waddle around the house with a pillow pressed over my stomach for a month, unable to help my disabled family with their daily tasks. I stopped breathing on the operating table for a few minutes and I only found out this year on MyChart. I was still contemplating suicide on a near constant basis.
My gynecologist told me I should look into electroconvulsive therapy, but I think she should have realized that the reason for my continued suicidal ideation was the fact that the surgery she told me would cure my PMDD actually did jack shit. I started ketamine therapy and I started taking Auvelity, a newer fast acting antidepressant that is literally just Wellbutrin and the active ingredient in cough syrup. These combined reduced the intensity of my depression only somewhat; during the luteal phase (the part of the menstrual cycle when PMDD is active) my depression went from a consistent 9/10 at baseline to a consistent 6.5/10 at baseline. But any time I made progress with my trauma and abandonment fears, it would revert entirely when the next luteal phase came around. I was trapped in a time loop and there was no action I could take to stop the day from repeating. I was caged in a school fair dunk tank on the playground of the preschool I got sold at, my ovaries like big pink rocks cuffed to my bones inside, strapping me to the water with their colossal weight. Got crucified on a cross made of my own damn fallopian tubes, extracted, enlarged, taxidermied and sewed into a big T. Nowhere was safe from me. My aunt’s appendix was gangrenous and wrapped around each surrounding organ when they took it out; my uterus felt like that, a diseased thing that had grown beyond what was natural, infecting every other part of me until I was reduced to cremation ash. My uterus was a collar double-bow-tied to the circumference of my throat, you know the ones with the barbs that dig into your neck and deliver a shock if you get a little bit angry, or beg for too much food, too much love, too much freedom. It made me sick in every sense of the word.
I came across another post about PMDD earlier this year. It described how PMDD actually worked, where it began in the body, and everything sort of fell into place, and I do believe this was a touch from the Light and the love of the divine, a little pinch of the cheek and an aren’t you just the cutest thing from God, because I was ready to propose electroconvulsive therapy to my psychiatrist the next time I saw her. I always believed it was inhumane, but I was desperate and I have always been easily manipulated, a pathetic gullible thing with a big fish mouth. I watched videos made by ECT patients where they discussed the memory loss caused by the treatment, and it terrified me—-I already have a memory loss disorder—-but I knew if I didn’t do something I would end up in prison and then killed in prison. I was ready to give up my functional mind because I was so ashamed of my inability to get better, so afraid of hurting someone I loved while in luteal or saying something I could never take back. PMDD had already ruined so many relationships for me, and it was getting exhausting. There was no way I could keep going.
I don’t remember what I did after that. I think my mother sent a message to my doctor on MyChart and I met back up with my gynecologist, who apologized to me for not appropriately educating me on my illness and offered to put me on Lupron Depot for a few months, which would shut down the production of estrogen in my body, essentially a kill switch for my right ovary. I think I cried on the exam table right then and there. I think my mom did too. It took a while for my insurance to improve it, because it’s not widely used for PMDD, but when I finally got the shot…
I don’t know. They say when you get the shot, estrogen production (and therefore PMDD symptoms) will surge before it stops. I was prepared for my ovary to throw its hands up like a defeated cartoon villain and go, “Nooooo!!! I’ll die before I go to jail!!!” or like in Babylon 5 when President Clark went Scorched Earth on Earth before dying. They also say when you get the shot, you lose a reincarnation or two, but I’ve never really trusted any of the They Says, or the They, or the sayings; I have only ever relied on myself. I had one day of unbearable emotion and the next day the clouds parted.
I became a different creature entirely. My ovary’s wickedness melted away when spritzed with the anti-ovary juice and good prevailed. My ovary Phoenix’d itself, Miss Congeniality’d itself, died to become beautiful. They put the needle in the flesh of my ass, angled it upward, and shoved it into my ovary from behind; it popped like a balloon, squirting infected pus all across the office, my depression disgusting and grotesque and unsightly but dead, still dead. And I got better. I feel lighter now.
Somehow, besides an unbearable insomnia, I am having very few negative symptoms; somehow menopause has only been a positive for me. I am having my ovary removed on September 11th, 2026, if you can believe the date. When I told my doctor how Lupron helped me she held my hand and we cried together.