The Depression. The Dysphoria. The Emotional Pain.
You are in a deep, deep hole in the forest and believe you will never come out. Life is meaningless. You are meaningless. Worthless.
Everything hurts too much. More than you can bear.
Overwhelming emotion.
Anxiety a consistent friend
–
In a breath, a grey veneer has been swept over the world. It’s heavy. Like a mourning shroud.
Weighs on your chest, your heart.
Your mind has jumped into a dark sea. Off a cliff. Before you knew.
The darkness. She is a demon laughing at you.
–
Complete hopelessness. Worthlessness. Imagine each negative thought you have had about yourself over the last weeks, months, years. Concentrate that into a moment. A single day. Two weeks. Magnify by ten.
Each pain you have felt of the world. Believed in utter certainty.
Overwhelming despair. Beyond ephemeral lowness of ‘blue’.
The world physically hurts to exists in. A sensory onslaught and attack. Every abrasive sound, every word, every experience, every sense.
Visceral. Intense.
Intense physical pain. Nausea. Sick, weak, general malaise.
Pelvic pain. And scraping. A scalpel claws from inside. Gnawing down.
The pain jets down into your thighs, legs, feet. Emanates into your ribs. Lower back.
You struggle to look after yourself. Buy the groceries. Clean the flat. Make yourself food. The things that need to be done.
The beliefs of worthlessness and incompetence are given shining evidence. Looking around you. You see the failings of the day.
You’re pathetic.
Your walk is the pace of a person three times your age. Breaks needed. Pelvis dragging you down. A marathon feat
Get yourself home? How?
Pelvis swollen. You look 3 or 4 months pregnant. Labour pains, as likened by mothers.
It hurts to eat. Alone in your flat, crying over dinner. Already a battle of preparing food.
Now, tears slipping down onto the plate.
Alone. Isolated. You carry the experience. Hiding. Performing. For, when spoken, you are scorned. Mocked. Misunderstood. Gaslit.
Glazing over the truth with a smile and laughter that cuts the edge of tears.
A doll screaming inside a glass house.
Your head feels under water. Sentences and calculations fall out. You trip, drop things. Clumsy.
They stare. They brand you. They probe. They question. They dismiss.
Mistakes are made. At work. In public. You walk into roads from confusion, disorientation.
You have cuts from accidents at home. Bruises. You fell. It slipped.
Siren sounds remind you of ambulances called. For the physical pain. For the intrusive thoughts.
Keep safe from yourself.
You fight to suppress and internalise the rages, the irritability, the anguish. To ensure you don’t inflict it on others, behave inappropriately in settings.
Always needing to be in control.
–
Feels like your ovaries are strangling your brain. Your nervous system. Your body.
I grapple with the complex notion; my ovaries that allow me children., a core desire, are what are making you sick.
–
Finally, exhausted. From her relentless nature. She is reliable; usually an admirable quality.
But,
I wouldn’t begrudge her skipping a month.
.
+Emma Caroline is a London based multicultural Fine Artist and Poet.
She has had Pmdd, dysmenorrhoea and a history of hemorrhagic cysts for 15 years. Finally receiving a correct diagnosis this year. A name to the dark thread through her life.
Through his poem and her Art she places poetic frames to the debilitating experience. Shared by many. From the heart and from the truth.
She hopes it will help shed light on the truth of PMDD and provide a space of resonation for others with Pmdd.
Find more of Emma’s art @emmacarolinearte