Poetry, prose, research & love letters, especially for you
A personal history of pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder
If the weather was bad at weekends I might make a camp in the downstairs loo and spend hours in there nesting and talking to imaginary friends. It kept me entertained for days on end. In my land of Dickensian make believe, I was always the strong big sister who was tasked with saving many vulnerable younger siblings from starvation or disaster.
Don’t worry darling
We women of the 2020s find ourselves in an interesting predicament. Emmeline Pankhurst led a well meaning bunch of revolutionary foremothers, with whom I would most definitely would have been marching had I been born a century earlier. They did much to liberate us from the XX chromosome-stymying perils of Victorian patriarchy (I feel this liberation keenly as I know categorically that my cyclical bouts of PMDD (or as the Victorians would have termed it ‘Hysteria’) would have had me incarcerated in a mental asylum for much if not all of my adult life had I lived then).
