We Weren’t Made for This

Or, when things go awry & why it’s not just about pregnancy

It’s difficult to talk about menstrual cycles going awry. It’s a heavy topic, tucked within another big topic, and that big topic has been made taboo. It all also happens within bodies which have been marginalized.

But I also find it difficult to talk about cycles and not acknowledge that they go awry. Maybe it’s just me but don’t you think things seem to be going awry a lot? I don’t know that it’s possible to say things are going awry more, because no one was conducting studies on PCOS in the 18th century, or folks’ experience of PMS during the Neolithic era. But for all that we know now, in 2023, five million people should not have to experience PCOS/AAE with no hope of resolution.¹ It shouldn’t take ten years to get diagnosed with endometriosis, only to told there’s nothing that can be done.² PMS and PMDD should not rule our lives. And no one should ever have to face any of this alone, in silence.

I think as soon as we start talking about things going awry though we also starting talking about “fixes.”

Because there seems to be so much going awry now, a lot of people are saying a lot of things about how we can “fix” it all, be that issues with our reproductive organs or otherwise. Conventional doctors are often unhelpful in this arena, because conventional medicine has left this issue behind, so who among us has not turned to the internet?

This week I went looking for some guidance about a concern I had and, as has happened to me before, I found myself listening to someone tell me What I Should Do. Ah yes, I thought, the quagmire of complicated advice, blame, anger and product hawking. Here it is again. Hooray.

Maybe you know what I’m talking about. You go looking advice and the person you end up listening to (maybe an influencer, or someone in the alt health and wellness space whose credentials are vague) says they have The Solution to your health concern. They speak boldly into the camera.³ They’ve got something to sell: a product, a protocol, a concoction, a ✨container.✨ (Or, nowadays, Healy.) They might have someone to blame, something to pit themselves against. They’re the Keeper of the Knowledge. Somehow, they also seem to know every insecurity you have and there’s a suggestion that if you don’t do what they say/buy what they’re selling you will never be well.

I get a very particular reaction when I see this content. It looks like this.

Thankfully, at this point, I have a better handle on how the body works, and how the grift gets grifted⁴. These things help me wade through the muck better than I used to.⁵ At one point in time it really threw me. I still have to carefully work through my automatic reaction of: But what if they’re right???

I have not yet found them to be right.

It’s hard to know what to do, what to believe, and to not fall into blaming yourself. And, don’t get me wrong, something isn’t right here in this modern world we call home. I agree with that. But I don’t see where the scarcity mindset, the anger, the fear mongering, the gatekeeping, or the influencing gets us. I don’t think it’s helping anybody.

Instead, I find myself thinking about how the world we live in is very, very new.

We live in a time of lightening fast change. I’m thirty and I remember when my family got an early form of the glowy light box I’m typing on and take for granted now. I can remember when you couldn’t use the internet and make a phone call at the same time. Electricity has only be in widespread use for about a hundred years. Cars, airplanes, air conditioning, factory farming, pesticides, texting, the Newsfeed—those are even newer.

Compare that to the world remaining largely the same for, at a minimum, 400,000 years. Several million is more like it, but 400,000 is a hard enough number to handle I think. Humans, in one form or another, have been evolving for hundreds of thousands years. For that time, there was little change in the environment or its threats. Humans lived with and within the natural world and its dangers—animals, poisonous plants, fellow humans, weather disasters, plagues, injuries, pathogens, etc. And they also lived within its rhythms: the seasons, moon cycles, day and night. That’s all there was.

That may all seem like ancient history, but that’s the point. Humans have mostly lived in what now feels like ancient history for hundreds of thousands of years. From Homo erectus to Homo sapiens we slowly changed while the environment stayed the same.⁶ There was little difference between the environment or our place in it between 100BC and 1400CE. Or 1400 and 1700.⁷

In the grand scheme of it all, we changed the environment we live in the blink of an eye. We have, at best, a little over a hundred years of the modern era. Think of the difference just between 1923 and 2023. But our bodies didn’t change at the same speed.

We weren’t made for this.

Our bodies and brains were evolving for hundreds of thousands to millions of years, adapting to the environment, its rhythms and its threats. I think about our nervous systems in particular and how for more generations than I can wrap my head around they were refining, refining, refining to a world I can’t fathom. Yet that’s the same nervous system running through my body now. I have the same body in a world that, in terms of evolution’s timeframe, changed overnight.

I asked my brother for his perspective on this. He’s a farmer with a deep interest in what I suppose is pre-history and human evolution. He’s a person who is carefully observing the natural world today and he can tell you all about Australopithecus.⁸ What he said was so poetic and dead on that I have no choice but to quote him here, with annotation. He said:

“You could say our nervous systems etc. [our bodies as a whole] didn’t adapt to that older lifestyle [the way the world used to be], but that lifestyle was the womb that birthed who we are as creatures. It’s our only natural habitat.” (Emphasis mine.)

We aren’t living in our natural habitat any more. The screens and their blue light, the notifications, the endless scroll, the world at our finger tips—this is not what we were made for. Our bodies/brains/nervous systems have little to no experience living in boxes where it can be daytime all the time, or 76°F all year. They’ve had basically no time to learn what to do about pesticides, antibiotics overuse, flame retardants, phthalates, parabens, food dyes, additives, pollution, vinyl chloride spewing out of overturned trains, or this much sitting.

And regardless of how much of a threat you feel any of those are, I think we can agree that they are all very new. Maybe we will adapt to them, but that’s going to take time we haven’t yet had.

What happens to an animal when it’s in a new place that is not its natural habitat, with elements it’s never seen? It doesn’t feel safe and it reacts accordingly. As my brother also said to me, when chickens are stressed they stop laying eggs.⁹

I think our bodies can feel unsafe in this new environment with its new threats and that can have really devastating consequences. Our bodies learned for several hundred thousand years what “safety” looked like and now we’ve turned all of that on its head. And so, things go awry. Menstrual cycle issues are quite often a way the body speaks up and says, “Hey, something isn’t right here! I don’t know what to do! I’d like to be safe, please, so that I can get back to creating.” Fertility awareness charting can help us read these messages. Learning the truth about our bodies can help us learn how to make them feel safe again.

It’s not that we’ve personally done the wrong thing or failed or that there’s some secret cabal using white sugar as a weapon of mass destruction.¹⁰ Sometimes, it’s a perfectly reasonable reaction to a new environment that doesn’t look like the home we grew up in for 400,000 years.

This is the path I like to take out of the quagmire of people shouting and hawking their goods and services (and bullshit). How can I help my body feel safe and what is the reality of my body as a product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution? This step requires no edicts from the internet, nor is it about living “ancestrally.” Because there’s no going back. We weren’t made for this but here we are.

And so I think about a soft, small animal that is far from home. If that little animal doesn’t feel safe, you don’t try to “fix it.” You don’t tell it to just stop eating dairy, or stop being stressed, or detox, or try acupuncture. You don’t tell it that its failed when it’s home is the fields and oak tress but now it’s in a cardboard box. You wouldn’t say any of that because it’s tender and soft. So you care for it, slowly and quietly. You help it feel safe again.

I don’t know what we do to fix things when they go awry. But I think this is where we can start. Hundreds of thousands of years and yet still some things don’t change. We are still the small, soft animal, looking for home.

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Will you come join me in the comments? 🤍

What do you do when things go awry? Do you feel bombarded by advice, confusing information and blame? How do you navigate it? What does the soft animal that is you want?

Even though I write about menstruation and cycles, it can still be hard to break out of the cultural norm and bring periods into the conversation.

My recent bleed started on a day I was supposed to take a walk with a couple fine folks. I try to hunker down on the first day of my cycle though because I get crampy for several hours and my legs get wobbly feeling. A heating pad and laying down is my preferred solution. So while technically I could join in on the walk, I knew I’d have to grit my teeth through the whole thing. And the way cycles go, I know that if I don’t care for myself in whatever way I can at each phase I’ll pay for it in an upcoming phase. It took me a bit to send a text to the group explaining the situation and asking if everyone would come to my house instead. Everyone responded to my text quickly and said: Absolutely we can come to your house! See you soon! So we sat outside in the sunshine, in the middle of my yard, with an extension cord running out of the house so I could plug in my heating pad. I can’t say for sure if it was just time or good company, but by the end of their visit my cramps were gone. And I learned something about speaking up for my needs.

Twelve days to the spring equinox (in the Northern hemisphere)!

Resources and links for and about cyclical living.

• Todays is International Women’s Day. 👩‍🌾🧙👩‍🦼👩🏽‍🔧🧘🏻‍♀️👩‍🍼🚣‍♀️👵🏻👩🏾‍🔬💃🏻👩‍🎨🧑‍🚀🧕

• Apple released their preliminary findings from their Women’s Health Study.

• Women in Lebanon are creating their own period products. As the article states, “menstrual products by virtue of their cost have essentially become a luxury item” for many people in this area. A luxury item.

• A Japanese study has found that a monthly injection of an engineered antibody may reduce lesions, scar tissue, and organ adhesions in monkeys with endometriosis. (Sadly, macaques also develop endometriosis, similar to humans. And sadly, that’s how science conducts these studies.) This could lead to the first disease-modifying therapy for people with endometriosis. I find it interesting for how this might help us learn more about the root cause of endo.

• The Well (formerly Grace of the Moon) has an online six week Body Literacy & Cycle Mapping course coming up in April. If you’re new to fertility awareness or want to level up your FA knowledge, this could be something to look into.

• I’m very excited for this book on menstruation to come out. And this one on the uterus, which was just released.

• If you want to forego using a charting app, I love the look of this paper charting journal that lasts two years. It’s currently on sale.

• I’d read basically anything Rae Katz writes, including this essay on blame, stress, the body and fertility.

• Finally, this video isn’t directly about cycles or cyclical living but I think it’s something to think about when we talk about cycles going awry.

I suppose I should say: there are no affiliated links here, nor do I think there will be.

Thank you for reading Peace of the Whole! I hope it can be a resource for cyclical bodies and the people that love them. If you feel so inclined, here are some ideas for how you can support my work:

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1. https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/pcos.html

2. https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/endometriosis

3. Lately, the ones I stumble on seem to really like going live on social media whilst they are bathing and liberally sprinkling “fuck” into sentences, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Gotta bring home the point somehow, I guess.

4. This podcast opened my eyes to the realities of grifting within the alt wellness space or “woo-sphere”: https://katyaweissandersson.com/podcast/ And I don’t always enjoy the hefty serving of snark but the Maintenance Phase is really bringing eyes to this subject too.

5. To be clear, I have great respect for “alternative” ways of healing and engage with many of them regularly. But the shilling? The preying upon people’s fears and blind spots? Coercing people so they blame themselves? I have no respect for that.

6. That one physical anthropology class I took as an anthropology major is finally coming in handy!

7. My head is spinning just thinking about these numbers.

8. https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/australopithecus-afarensis

9. If you’d like to learn more about the stress response, the nervous system and hormones, I recommend this post: https://www.clarabailey.com/2021/05/12/science-of-stress/

10. An actual thing I heard in a class that I thought was about nourishing mothers and babies.