Women Should Think Twice About Birth Control
battling the hormonal beast with intuition
Intuition is a powerful remedy.
It cannot be found lurking on supermarket shelves, or written on any doctors prescriptions. It cannot be found growing out of the ground, and you won’t find it down the back of your sofa.
Intuition exists from within. And a lot of people don’t realise this, but you have access to your intuition at all times. For me, personally, intuition has become the fundamental savior in staying synced to my body and minds needs.
It’s remarkable. This given, self-navigating system that everybody inherits from birth. It’s almost like if life were a game (think Animal Crossing), then intuition is your compass, and your conscience is the chosen map.
But a lot of the time we get stuck. We need to make decisions that we didn’t plan for. Some of those decisions can come at a price, some which are harder to navigate than others.
In this case, I’m talking about modern medicine.
My story with the pill
I had my first period at eleven years old. It was the most excruciating thing, but I’ll spare you the gory details, because who the hell wants to hear it?
Know that it was traumatic. Apparently, my mother went through the same symptoms month after month when she was younger, too. She suggested the only remedy she knew. Something she was prescribed to help overcome the pitfalls of not being able to stand and wailing in misery — the pill.
For the longest time, it felt like a miracle had been synthesized from the heavens above to save me from my waking monthly nightmares. I was one of many cursed women in the world who were doomed, floor-bound in pain and deemed hormonal-ass-bitches for blowing up.
I could pop a pill consistently for 30 days and live my life free of any physical pain — who the hell wouldn’t agree to such a quick fix?
For awhile this worked liked wonders.
But then unknowingly, I’d taken a backseat to the heavy toll that this little pill was having on my mental health. I’d traded off physical symptoms for adopting mental symptoms. It was ironic really.
I was causing another kind of insidious pain, seething from beneath, that would unknowingly last for years to come.
I became severely depressed for years whilst growing up. Thinking this was me, this is who I was, I believed that nobody and nothing could save me. I was a lost cause. Jaded youth was an understatement.
Nobody listens when you’re a teenager. Hormones kicking about the place, angst all pent up and ready for bloodshed. Anarchy.
I believed that I was cynical to the core and that the world just didn’t get me. But oh, how it was all twisted and contorted. I was still to blame, but I was equally the victim in this medicines game.
Discovering the truth
Around the age of about 21yrs old, life had rippled so much that it caused a crack in my emotionally unstable exterior. My intuition began to shine through. I asked myself — what if there is something obvious that I haven’t tried to feel better?
So I did a little experiment with myself and decided after eight or so years, to stop taking the contraceptive pill.
I decided not to tell my boyfriend at the time, for fear he would talk me out of it (and because he was a total asshole). He noticed almost immediately that there was something different about me. I noticed it too, but it was surefire having somebody who didn’t know, confirm this.
Everything seemed like a joke after that. This cartoon cloud of thunder and rain that hung lowly over my gloomy head for years, disappeared. Some spells of sunshine even managed to breakthrough.
I was diagnosed with BPD during the height of my contraceptive use, something I believed and played in to, because well, if the shoe fits, wear it.
I realised after cessation from the pill that this was a gross misdiagnosis. I also wondered how many other women are wrongly diagnosed with (insert mental illness here) because of this little pill of evil.
Emotions were manageable again. I could breathe. I thought about what I was going to say before vomitting vindictive words of spite at people. No more overreactions, no more melodrama, no more crying spells.
My advice, something I wish I could pass on to young teens and other twentysomethings
Research isn’t always accurate.
There are no hard facts when it comes to peoples emotions, because emotions are random and entirely relative to that particular individual. This is common sense. But a lot of doctors will have you over, because that’s the training that’s been fed to them. Nothing personal.
But science, I hear you say.
Science is about proving a theory less wrong. Theories constantly change, though each time with more research, we get a little further towards the truth. That’s all we can do really.
Nothing will ever be an absolute truth when we’re analyzing individuals, because peoples microbiomes are so vastly different. Science cannot possibly account for every individual human in this sense. Take statistics with a pinch of salt, and remember that not every grain in the salt shaker is going to come out at once.
While I was on the pill, ten-feet-under in my emotional distress (and misdiagnosed with BPD) I was given an opportunity to take part in some scientific research.
The program looked at two distinct groups — people with BPD, and people with no mental illness whatsoever. The tests were to monitor the brains radioactivity in an MRI scanner while the subject had to engage in various games related to money. Part of the experiment was also a 1-on-1 questionnaire with a researcher, who asked each subject personal questions whilst writing down their reactions as well as listening to their answers.
Since I was not legitimately a person with BPD, that case studys research could be hugely inaccurate in its findings. Who knows how many people in that case study had a similar misdiagnosis to mine, and how many of those allegedly normal participants had underlying mental ill health instead?
I have found that the best way to indicate an issue with yourself, albeit it physical or mental, is to trust in your gut instinct and go with what your body tells you.
Most of us are not in tune with our bodies requirements because of the amount of misinformation we consume. It’s easy to believe a statistic and conclude that the evidence points in one direction, when we don’t understand something ourselves. It takes true courage to trust in your instincts and find out what works best for you with medicine.
After the whole episode with the contraceptive pill happened, I was then fooled in to getting an IUD at the expense of another partner.
I truly felt like this was the person I was going to be with forever, and I wanted us to procure sex on a more intimate level. I thought it was okay to change my body and have this foreign insertion do so for me.
Honestly, I felt like an alien once I had this copper thing implanted in me.
I wasn’t myself. I blamed the IUD when that was only part of the problem — the other part was that I allowed someone else to have a say over what goes in to my body.
I got it removed after about a month. Doctors turned their noses up at the idea that the IUD had such a negative impact on me. They did this because of statistics, relaying that the evidence was against me. It was a polite and intellectual way of saying, “what do you know.”
Darn data, always erasing out the individual.
I found that only one doctor believed in me, and she was more than happy to listen to my reasoning. She helped get it removed.
The pill shouldn’t be taken so lightly when you are a teenager. We should allow girls to mature naturally, and let hormones permit their right course of action without the intervention of modern medicine.
It’s one thing to use the pill as birth control, but it’s another to use it as a band-aid for physical distress. I found that ibuprofen in times of absolute emergency was way more beneficial than taking anything consistently and having it change my chemical makeup.
Antidotes aren’t always the answer, they can also be the devil in disguise.
I lost so many of my teenage years to suicidal thoughts and loneliness because of how that little devil made me feel. The price was way too high. I’ve only just started to go through my teenage years again in my twenties, now that I’m off of it for good.
Not to rule out birth control entirely — because I understand the risk of unwanted pregnancies while growing up. You still want to get the jiggy-ah-jig-ah — without the oh no, why did I ruin my life? thing.
Let me tell you this, ladies.
Any guy that is lucky to have your body will have to respect your decision, no questions asked. It’s not a womens job to change their physiology at the expense of a mans pleasure.
Thankfully, I had one partner that agreed with this. He couldn’t wait until they came up with a remedy for men, and that he’d be more than willing to take it once it was made. What a refreshing thing to hear, after years of playing devils advocate with my wellbeing.
I’m not saying we should ditch contraceptives altogether.
They serve their purpose in this world, and prevent a lot of unwanted baggage for people who aren’t responsible enough to deal with the repercussions of their actions.
Tread lightly when you’re young, though. You’re still morphing in to an adult, there’s going to be a lot of emotional turbulence naturally anyway. Monitor how you feel while you’re taking it, both on and off these things, then decide for yourself if its worth it or not.
This is just my personal tale.
I flipping wish that someone was there to offer me this kind of information when I needed it most, growing up. Not every girl will experience periods to the same excruciating degree that I did, so maybe this wasn’t helpful. I get it.
Summary
Listen to your body. Your mind will often play tricks on you, especially when your mind is being manipulated by hormones.
Modern medicine serves its purpose in the world in many areas, but its only a band-aid, not the cure. Its a temporary fix to an ongoing problem we have with ourselves physically and/or mentally. It will patch up parts of the problem, but the problem will not absolve.
It may delay an impending death, but it will not make you immortal. My personal healing remedy is and will always be intuition. So should yours.
And I believe with a bit of faith and some clarity, that anybody can access their intuition at any time and use it in a way that accommodates your own personal needs.
Note: My writing on here draws from my own personal experiences and revelations. I rarely use links and supporting evidence for my claims (and I know that so many articles on here rely on this kind of evidence to support their argument) but that’s just not my style. If that makes my information invalid because its mostly opinion-based, so be it, but I have faith in what I’ve learned and I don’t feel the need to source faith in someone else’s research to back up what I believe in when I know its true to me.
