What your hormones are not.
A letter for anyone who has been told she is being a lot.
Dear My Friend,
Somewhere in the past week, someone has probably told you you're being a lot.
Maybe in those words. Maybe in a look. Maybe by you, to yourself, in the bathroom mirror at 8:47 on a Tuesday, putting on mascara and feeling unaccountably sad about a small thing.
I want to tell you something while I have you here. Sit down.
There's tea on, somewhere.
Your hormones are not making you crazy.
I know what they told us. They told us we were hormonal — said as a diagnosis, said as an apology, said as a punchline. They told us the days before our period were a small monthly haunting to be endured by the people around us, and that the rest of the month was the version of ourselves people actually wanted to deal with.
This is wildly untrue, and I'd like to refund you those years.
So. Here, in plain language, is what your hormones are not.
They are not a malfunction. Estrogen rises and falls; progesterone shows up halfway through the month and clocks out a week before your bleed; the whole arrangement repeats itself in a slow, ancient rhythm that has been working in human bodies for at least three hundred thousand years. If something has been running that long, it is not broken. It is just running.
They are not making you weak. Needing more sleep in the luteal week is not weakness — it is a body asking for the rest that the body needs. You wouldn't call a tree weak for losing its leaves in October. The exhaustion you feel before your period is real biochemistry. Progesterone is sedating. Your basal metabolic rate is genuinely higher. You are doing more, with less, on purpose. Of course you are tired. Lie down.
They are not making you irrational. The week before your bleed, the protective veneer is thinner — the polite layer that lets you tolerate the unpaid emotional work, the small slights, the meetings that should have been an email. When that layer thins, the things you've been suppressing come up. They were already there. Your luteal self is not making things up.
Your luteal self is the one telling you the truth, and the rest of the month is the one talking you out of it.
I'm not saying believe every feeling. I'm saying don't dismiss one just because it arrived on Day 24.
They are not making you "too much." The version of yourself who laughs loudly in her follicular week, and cries at a coffee shop in her luteal one, and feels electric on the day she ovulates — that is not three different broken women. That is one woman, alive in different weathers. You wouldn't apologise for a sky for having weather. Don't apologise for the body that contains one.
They are not your enemy. They are not a force to be subdued, biohacked, suppressed, or fixed. They are not optimization problems. They are not punishments. They are not the reason you are like this. (You are like this, in part, because you are a person — a complicated one, hopefully — and people are like that.)
Here, while we are at it, is what they are.
They are old. They are slow. They are doing the same work in you that they have been doing in every cycling body before yours, and that they will keep doing in every one after.
They are a weather system. A four-act play your body has been rehearsing your whole life. A small inner climate with seasons of its own.
They are information. The luteal heaviness is data. The follicular lightness is data. The ovulatory openness, the menstrual quiet — all data. You can listen, and decide what to do with it. Or you can not listen, and have your body get louder until you do. Up to you.
They are working, mostly. They might wobble. They might be doing something that wants attention, and if so, attention is reasonable. But fluctuation is not failure.
A body that changes is not a broken body.
A body that asks for rest is not a weak body. A body that cries in the bathroom on Day 26 is not a crazy body.
It is a body that has been told it shouldn't, and is doing it anyway.
So — and this is the only part of this letter that wants anything from you. If you find yourself, this month or next, in a moment where you are about to apologise to someone for the state of your inner weather, consider letting the apology dissolve before it leaves your mouth. Pour yourself something warm. Sit down with whatever you are feeling. Notice what day it is in your cycle.
The body is not asking to be fixed. It is asking to be known.
You are not crazy. You are not weak. You are not broken. You are not too much.
You are a person whose body changes through the month, and that is the design.
With Care
Freyja
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