For many years, I had Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), or extreme PMS. Imagine PMS on steroids, and you have a small sense of my monthly joy. If you possibly can, imagine up to half a month of this, every month. I felt like I was strapped on a circus carousel, doomed to cycle through the same craziness every 28 days. 

During PMDD times, my cognitive function was severely impaired, I experienced high levels of anxiety and depression, and I could barely sleep or work. But I could write, so writing became one of my top activities. Thus I became an accidental specialist in the process of writing, a speciality I neither chose nor had any fantasy of parlaying into anything useful to anyone but myself. In lieu of pharmaceuticals (doctors did not seem know how to treat me), I was literally using writing to survive. 

Flash forward two decades, and with PMDD behind me, I’m left with an ex-prisoner’s understanding of a process that I know can turn the key in a vaulted door. Would I even be here if I had not written so intensively, those long years? If I have a strong conviction in the work I do, it is because beyond the results that I see in my groups, I have a dramatic, personal experience of its power.

Here is one gem I stumbled upon along the way. While I had PMDD, I often wrote from a state of insomnia, waking at 4 a.m. with a poem and nursing it through until morning. I had a true concern that if I ever learned how to sleep normally, my writing would suffer. Maybe I wouldn’t even be able to write “sober”! As if the gift that writing was for me was inexorably linked with my malady.

Well, it turns out unsurprisingly that I write perfectly well when I’m calm and awake; possibly even better, as I’m not struggling with exhaustion and hormonally-induced madness! Who would have guessed?! We writers tend to believe that ritualized or extreme situations are necessary for our craft (the special pen, the long night of the soul) when really we have access to our writing at all times and in every state of mind — even when we are happy, healthy and sane. Good golly!

Image courtesy of Laura Chouette, Upsplash