This post actually is about my period.  It won’t be as bad as my last post about my period, but I still thought I’d give fair warning. You know, in case you adventurous boys who barreled on last time wanted to go ahead and stop here.  If you want to keep on keeping on, the good stuff’s after the jump…

At long last, I am able to answer the burning question in everyone’s mind: Was Sarah’s Relatively Pain-Free Period A One-Time-Fluke?

NO! It wasn’t.  Apparently cutting out any and all caffeine from the diet was the magical change required to make me period-pain free.  I am so excited about it that I can’t hardly stand it.  I am still having some twinges, but they are incredibly slight in comparison to the gut-wretching pain that used to put me out of commission for days at a time.  I was still pretty lethargic the day that it started, admittedly, but that could have just as easily have been because of my sleep deprivation.

Why was I suffering from sleep deprivation, you ask?

BECAUSE I WAS BAT-SHIT CRAZY.

What I didn’t realize the whole time I was on birth control, is that the birth control helped me stay more hormonally balanced all month long.  In fact, I was so crammed full of hormones that I quit having periods all together.  That meant that for over a year, I never suffered a single estrogen-crash, end-of-the-world breakdown.  Last week, I had at least 4.

It’s like I’d forgotten how to have a period.  The physical part of it came back really quickly; I easily remembered my body’s own incatricities and patterns.  The emotional side, however, didn’t come back so easily.  The entire week leading up to the beginning, and even a few days after start, I was like a drug-crazed hyena about 50% of the time, and an Ultra Emo Eyeore the rest of the time.  Every night I would break down into tears for no reason that I could name in particular and literally weep until I feel asleep.  One night, I fell asleep chanting to myself mantras learned in therapy.  Another, somewhere around breath 8 of a 10 breath set that I was working through so that I might quit crying long enough to try to go to sleep.  By the time I was half-way through my period, I realized that I had simply forgotten how to handle the emotional rollercoaster that occurs every month.  EVERY SINGLE MONTH.  I feel like a 14 year old, minus the full-blown tragedy of high school drama.  Perhaps I should re-read Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret in an effort to get back to the basics of how to deal with emotions during your period.