Made for babies

My family is made to make babies. Birth control that's close to 100% will be somewhat less reliable for us; our hip structure tends to lead to easy pregnancies, easy births, and lots of kids. I know mom had really heavy periods, and I did for a long time. My cycle was always blessedly regular and came with obvious communication from my body. It only started to wobble by a couple days in the the last several years.

So with the PMDD thing I went on birth control pills. I started them about 100 days ago.

I bled for the first 40 days or so. That backed off for a couple weeks, then I had a very light period for a normal amount of time, 4-5 days. I stopped bleeding. Now I'm bleeding again, lightly, and I seem to have had some of the accompanying emotional stuff right before the bleed started.

So I'm still cycling even though I'm on pills specifically designed to stop that. I don't even know if this is supposed to be possible? On birth control pills one "normally" goes off them to cause a pseudo-period every month (there aren't the same hormonal and ovulation things going on, so I think medically it's not the same thing, but it does get rid of the accumulated endometrial lining). Lots of people take them back to back to prevent periods and medically it seems there's little evidence to suggest that's a problem. I know some people can spot/bleed lightly kind of continuously on the pill, but I don't know if that's normally in a cycle pattern.

It's notable that, like endometriosis, one of the things older-school doctors prescribe for PMDD if they acknowledge it exists is "get pregnant, that will give you nine months where it doesn't bother you".

Meanwhile on the lower dose of sertraline I'm obviously back to being able to enjoy my hobbies but I'm having progressively longer bouts of dissociation of various kinds. I'm also still ultra tired and some of the weird stuff around heartbeat, dizziness etc that I got occasionally will hang around for several hours in the morning. Vision is also still weird. So I'm still way, way better than I was without it but still just super not functional.

It's definitely possible that this is autistic burnout (a lot of these are pretty classic symptoms) and that the sertraline is erasing most of the hormonal stuff and letting me keep powering through, which just makes the burnout worse and clearer.

But anyhow, this is mostly an administrative note about renewed bleeding.

Home?

So last night I posted on fb that it might be good to put a trampoline in my livingroom instead of a sofa. I have a sofa downstairs, and a trampoline is multi-use: you can nap on it but you can equally do body stuff on it.

This morning my co-worker, the one I work closely with, came up to me and said he'd thought of doing the same thing awhile back. I was describing how I'd prefer aerial silks but I wasn't sure structurally how my house worked, and he offered to come put up hooks for aerial silks. Not that I can't do both.

It's been a long time before someone came up to me in person and said "yeah, I'm like that too". Like, I'm tearing up a little. Mostly it's like "I never thought of that" accompanied by either "that's so cool" or "I could never do that".

The roads here feel as familiar as my own skin when I drive them. The seasons are each year different from the other, but they hold me in a familiar pattern now. They shape my activities with the same light steady pressure that I shape clay on the wheel.

And today I felt seen.

I think the green hair is working.

The two faces of breakup season

My coworker takes guesses at breakup every year. It's been as early as April 6 and as late as I think May 16 in the last twenty years. He has a neighbour identify a particular strip across the lake that has to be ice-free. This has been a long cold spring; I guessed May 12th. The prize is bragging rights, which is why my PDA self can participate. I have serious issues with competition.

The long cold spring hasn't stopped it being a dry spring. The ground was dead dry last fall and we got a normal amount of snow or just barely above normal. There are spots on the mountain where we did controlled fires last fall and it seems like with snow off them they're still smouldering this spring. Uncomfortable.