Emma Hardy

But at the same time, I didn't really want to blow up the whole relationship over, I don't know, him still being house trained.

Okay, so this is kind of the... I ended up kind of structuring the book around this a little bit, which is I had that tension that we just spoke about, about not really understanding if this was true and that I had this as an illness or if I was just diagnosed by some man who was giving me a modern form of a hysterical diagnosis.

And so I really wanted to understand how...

hormones were actually affecting my body.

So I kind of went through a three stage treatment plan.

The first one was supposed to be three months of just raw dogging at tracking my cycle.

I'd been on and off different types of birth control, like many people have since I was 15.

And so I didn't really know what my underlying cycle was.

And I hadn't had like an uninterrupted period where I could see

what my body was actually doing in that luteal phase.

And so I started that and my doctor was like, no, no, no, we need to get your medication straight away.

And I understand where she's coming from now because I do have it.

But I did really want to have like a more cooperative form of care when I was trying to understand my body and then choose the most effective treatment or choose

a treatment based on knowledge as opposed to guesswork.

And so I did those three months and then it was like super, super clear that I had it.

The most surprising part for me was actually that I was happy some of the time, like seeing like obviously I knew that I was having these dips, but seeing that like actually I was in a good bubbly mood most of the month was actually so surprising because it feels so overwhelming.

Yeah, so, well, my psychologist described it, and I think I described this way in the book as well, as being like childbirth, where the pain is so intense that your body can't really stop you from experiencing that, but it can instead kind of save you from remembering the wholeness of it.

So it's not like a complete forgetting, like I've woken up and I'm in a room covered in scratches like a werewolf or whatever.

It's not like that.

But it just feels like less...