Emma Hardy

forward it feels like almost like a shadow of what happened so I remember that I was like upset the night before when pushed I'll be like oh yeah that was like really bad but I actually struggled to even like empathize with what I was feeling at that time like my own like the extremities of my own feeling like I can't really muster up that same

tension in my body and then when I'm in that tension it's impossible to imagine not being that tense um I guess it's like possibly a metaphor for how we like definitely live in the present but yeah it's not like a total annihilation of memory but it is recalling it is not the same at all as experiencing it so you did the three months and then what was the plan from there

So then I wanted to try a form of birth control that had been approved in America for treatment of PMDD, which was very bad for me.

This was a pill called Yaz and I didn't know exactly how bad it would be, but it

really spiked my progesterone levels with hindsight and led to an episode, a quite intense episode of suicidal ideation quite suddenly.

And that really escalated my treatment plan after that.

I needed to take time off work because of that.

And I needed to find a way to get better.

But I was also, with hindsight, it's like, I mean, hindsight is everything.

It was also quite scary, the thought of coming off the pill once I was on it, because I wasn't sure whether it was the change in hormones from adding or subtracting a medication or if it was the pill itself that was making me feel so low.

And even though I was depressed the entire time I was on the pill.

It was like stable at that point, whereas going on it hadn't been stable at all.

And yeah, it was just I was so terrified of what I might do to myself.

I didn't want to come off it.

So I kept and I didn't want to come off it and risk having that kind of spike of hormones again, which my doctor was like, you're crazy.

You need to just like need to just listen to my advice.

And like, yeah, she's probably right.

But yeah, then I eventually went on SSRIs.

that was amazing it was I was so scared of it because you hear all these things about SSRIs messing up your sex life and it did mess up my sex life but the good news is that I no longer wanted to kill myself which I mean is so much like it's not a good trade-off and I think women are often given two bad hands to choose between but I would choose that hand every single day

Yeah.