I bet you weren’t expecting a love letter.
You must know by now that modern culture has betrayed you, has turned us against you, us wild ones. I write to share that I have remembered. I have remembered your wisdom, how you play in concert with the rest of my body to create the symphony that is the miracle of life. How without you, life would not exist.
How my restless nights are just you shielding a potential embryo, progesterone running me hot. How my immune system activation exists to ensure I will not destroy that which I most want to create. How my exhaustion is progesterone rising, its whole purpose to draw me toward rest. How my anxiety is honing my threat perception, something essential in ancient times. Detecting danger with heightened sensitivity could be a matter of life and death for me and my entire future lineage.
This anxiety, born from a rise in cortisol, gives way to a progesterone surge. Two sisters from the same hormonal bloodline, where when one surges, the other pays the price. I used to be frustrated when PMS hit hard, living in an environment that rewards thrashing against a natural current, while all you were trying to do was protect me. Our societal pressure tells us to keep working, never stop exercising, be always on, always rhythmless. This, of course, runs in direct opposition to your function: sustaining the miracle of life.
I’ve been asking myself: what matters more, climbing a ladder I’ll never reach the top of, or tending an ecosystem where the future has a ladder at all?
When I’ve felt low during your visits, I shouldn’t have been blaming you, but rather my own overactivity. My stress reduces my dopamine levels, which are further diminished by you, only with the intention of slowing me down: to protect new life from danger, to conserve my energy, to reduce infection risk, to preserve my reserves. You draw me inward. I now know that rest isn’t indulgence. It’s a biological imperative.
Luteal can feel like holding back rushing water, like my insides are bigger than my outsides. It can feel like irritability with nowhere to go, breast tenderness, lower back ache, cramps that demand to be heard. I used to treat all of these as malfunctions. Now I understand them as a precise and personalized dashboard, each sensation pointing toward something in my system calling for restoration. And now that I know how to read them, how to support myself back toward balance, the freedom that comes with finally moving with the current instead of against it is immense.
You make me keenly aware of any dysfunction in my lifestyle, my relationship, my experience. Thank you, serotonin decrease, for illuminating the unseen. You drive me to tidy, organize, and prepare for the arrival of new beginnings, ensuring a safe landing for new life or new chapters.
And you always send a messenger. I thank you, and my bleed, my fifth vital sign, for giving me a loud and poignant reminder when something is off. Different shades of crimson, different consistencies, different symptom expressions, each pointing toward an imbalance in my hormonal geography. This diagnostic tool has been invaluable. And it’s one I had no access to while on birth control.
To understand why I’m writing this, you need to know where I’ve been.
I am not a stranger to birth control. I started the pill at 15 and had two IUDs back-to-back beginning at 18, inserted with fervor at my university medical center. My second one caused immense disruption, which I knew at my core, despite three OBGYNs gaslighting me. Two painful attempts to remove it without proper medication. Three doctors dismissing six-plus months of chronic yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis, insisting my IUD wasn’t the cause, despite every diet change and every medication failing. That was fucked.
When the fourth gynecologist told me, in my mid-twenties, that the IUD had embedded and I might be infertile, I was rocked. It was as if the whole house of cards had come down at once.
Upon removal, almost every symptom disappeared. Immediately.
The verdict is still out on how that experience has shaped my ability to create life. I haven’t tried yet, and I’ll share that journey when I do. What I know is that I am grateful to no longer be living in perpetual luteal mode, which is essentially what hormonal birth control creates. Because every phase of the cycle is a vital part of female rhythm. Not a phase to be muted.
And here’s what I never knew: in luteal, I optimize for partners who invoke stability and safety. In ovulation, research suggests I may be drawn through scent toward genetic difference, toward partners whose immune landscape complements mine, creating conditions for a more resilient embryo. Without this self-claimed unshackling, I might have chosen a partner I would slowly, quietly, find I no longer pine for.
Shout out to my partner, who celebrates my womanhood and asks me to share more about what it means to be a woman so he can better understand me and the other half of the population. He has told me many times how grateful he is to understand female cycles, so he can hold space for me more fully and temper his own expectations of my capacity at any given moment. Dearest luteal, he thanks you too.
Dearest luteal, I write this to apologize. For all the frustration I pointed your way when I should have been pointing it at a much less wholesome systemic issue. For the hours I spent judging my body’s shape and aggressively releasing that judgment at the gym during your sacred call to slow down. For not knowing, and then knowing, and still not listening. By forcing intensity during your arrival, I only created a chain reaction, fulfilling the exact thing I was trying to avoid: mounting stress, and by domino effect, weight gain. A funhouse mirror of societal pressure, biology, and stories I’d been fed for decades.
I write this not to convince anyone to reproduce. Only to encourage a return to respecting the cycles we were built to move through. Cycles are everywhere in life, the seasons, the tides, the breath itself. Nothing in nature moves in a straight line. To treat our own rhythms as inconveniences is to place ourselves outside of nature entirely, when we have never been anything but of it.
If you are on hormonal birth control and this lands as criticism, please know it isn’t. This is not a case against contraception. It is a case for curiosity. Whatever your relationship with your cycle, the invitation is the same: to listen to your body as an ally rather than a liability.
I’m not a doctor. This is not medical advice. It’s a beckoning, to listen a little closer to your body, to do your own research, and to resist blindly following someone who has no lived experience in your body before you’ve spent time exploring it with curiosity yourself. Before ostracizing a perfectly natural part of being a bleeding woman, take a moment to appreciate that you exist at all. Thank luteal for that, at the very least. And remember where you should really be pointing the finger.
Loving every messy part of being a woman is a radical act. It takes courage. But if you choose it, you are not alone.
And if that feels too big right now, start here: stop using negative language for how your emotional expression changes throughout your cycle. That is the first step toward liberation. Words are powerful, let’s use them to invoke compassion rather than separation from others like us.
Yours, in every phase.