Hormone Story (Condensed Poem Draft)
You’re born in the 70s,
a decade with no language for any of it.
Your mum had a hysterectomy when you were seven,
so periods were silent —
not hidden, just absent.
One bag of huge Lille Whites,
loop‑on,
sitting in the bathroom cupboard.
Always there,
background furniture,
never explained.
No roadmap.
No warning label.
So when your period arrived in 1986,
it hit like weather you’d never been taught to read —
a storm front,
loud, fast, uninvited.
You just got on with it,
because that’s what girls did.
You learned to cope
before you even knew
what coping was.
Then life happens —
busy, relentless, stacked.
Your hormone system works quietly,
scaffolding you
without you ever noticing.
If you’re lucky, it works well.
If you’re unlucky, you still don’t stop.
You build your life around the patch,
the cycle, the rhythm,
fixing, managing,
balancing the force in place.
Life so busy —
not a race,
but you run it anyway.
Then perimenopause arrives,
and it’s like being hit by a bus.
Hormones leave you
one by one.
The strong system that worked and worked
lets the cogs slip.
Suddenly nothing works.
One minute strong, powerful, confident —
the next,
a volcano in your throat,
words stuck,
the switch flipping without warning.
You leave the room discombobulated.
The switch flips again.
And again.
And again.
If you’re really unlucky,
your daughter gets PMDD,
and you realise the cycle repeats —
I was ND, undiagnosed, unsupported.
She got PMDD — clinical, brutal.
And she was ND too,
taught to mask.
The sadness is
the cycle still repeated.
The shit you thought had no name
suddenly has one.
Then your daughter hits menopause
before you do.
Hormones, hormones —
working strong,
then gone.
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