Validation

Yesterday was a... group? for PMDD folks, put on remotely by a women's reproductive center. There was a psychiatrist and a gynecologist.

This is the first time I've heard someone say that a condition that removes 7-8 functional days per month and can cause extreme nonfunction and suicidality can count as serious, and therefore I'd be allowed to have more treatment than "maybe this birth control pill or SRI will help". It's the first time I've heard that my basically zero energy days, where I'm scared I'll die because breathing feels like it takes too much energy, is probably connected (58% of PMDD folks have lethargy as a symptom, and mine is just a little on the more intense side).

In part this means it's the first time I'm able to really admit how bad it is, because part of coping with something is minimizing it. My whole life I've planned around staying away from social contact, making decisions, and important events before my period. Things weren't "that bad" "most of" the time, and I had a lot of compensatory ability the rest of the time.

It's kind of like autism, though: the realization isn't entirely that it's bad for me, so much as that many other people have it so so easy in this regard.

Unlike autism this is something with a potential solution, and which I'm not in the least ambivalent about getting rid of. The gynecologist said that in extreme cases that don't respond to anything else, there's a drug that shuts down the ovaries for six months as a test, with a little bit of hormone supplementation to keep osteoporosis etc at bay. If that works, the ovaries can come out. This is after trying various birth control, psych meds, etc, but-- her examples of extreme cases are my everyday life.

It's also a reminder to me that I'm 21 days into my second type of birth control pill and things are pretty bad; they say after 3 months if it hasn't helped it probably won't, but I think this is not helping. It's put me at not exactly the bottom of my cycle, but pretty far into the bad stuff range. I'm taking it one day at a time but I miss my life. I miss not having to be so so careful with everything all the time, nd I realize that I've always had to be so careful with everything all the time because I always had to compensate for the bad times.

The clinic that ran the group doesn't take over my care, but they send information sheets to my doctor, and they're available to my doctor for consults on this stuff. I feel like someone has my back?

Fun fact: this isn't a hormonal disease, that is, there isn't a hormonal imbalance. It's an issue with the way the brain processes normal hormones and "normal" hormone fluctuations.

( Some symptoms, content sucks, sui etc )

Imbolc and everything about spring

Let's talk about something very real though: sun is returning. This time of year varies: I see a "warm", I see a "-32C", it's all over in past entries. This time of year is reliably steady: the light is coming back, I catalogue my seeds and start making decisions.

In 2020 I wrote Imbolc isn't spring; it's the evidence-based belief that spring really will come to exist so we should get ready and start planning.

This week I've been shelling the last of my corn. Corn is amazing for breeding for a couple reasons: it tends to outcross, or share pollen with the corn plants nearby to it, so if you want to mix two plants together you can plant them near without doing the kind of fancy tweezers-and-scalpel surgery needed on tomatoes; and if the mother has light coloured outer parts (skin layers, basically) you can see whether it has crossed with a darker pollen-father because the kernel will be a different colour (or sometimes the midlayers of skin).

So shelling corn isn't just gauging yield and admiring the beauty of the crop and evaluating how well it did. Shelling corn, if it's light corn, is also looking to directly see what was crossed and with what. Sometimes there are blue kernels, or red. Sometimes they're blue speckled or red starred. I didn't have original plans to do this but I find myself picking out the crossed kernels. I want to plant them all together and see the diversity that results in that patch: some plants taller or shorter, with redder or more chartreuse stalks or silks, stockier or slimmer, producing a clump of plants from one root or a single reaching stem. I'm almost done shelling (I'd left the corn to dry on the cobs for months stacked in dairy crates to dry) and soon I'll start setting aside the seed in small bags for each plot, then vacuum sealing and freezing the rest.

I'm starting to pull out my tomato seeds. In 2021 I grew a bunch of stuff, it was my first year landracing, and then it got sealed up into the vault because I was moving spring 2022. I kind of forgot about the details of it. Landracing is about adapting a diverse population to a very particular landscape, and in my mind that seed, grown and saved a year in threshold, was no longer adapted to my land since I was moving. Well, I found that 2021 seed and it's already a year adapted to threshold, so this will be its second year in its home! I remember things about it, there's a very sweet tomatillo for example, that I wanted to keep sweet for eating out-of-hand as a fruit. It's like someone gifted a year's work to me. There are all these pepper seeds. There are greens mixes carefully blended to go feral and create a seedbed of edibles.

Outside there are several feet of snow on the ground, 6" of ice on the driveway thanks to the recent warm snap, and it's supposed to snow 40cm. I will not start any transplants until March 1 at the earliest. Still, it's light for an hour after work, I have seeds to sort, and the next month will rush by so quickly.

The light returns.

Corn colour genetics for reference

( long )