Invisible Illness

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The Insidiousness of Period-Related Body Dysmorphia

Not just an expectation of the female experience

Alaina Ruth
Invisible Illness
Published in
4 min readOct 19, 2020
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

I’m standing in the squat rack, my skin prickling from the pre-workout supplement I took. I squat close to my body weight, pumping out the weight like nothing. I catch my breath when I rerack and I want to cry. I hate my body.

Why?

Later I’m scrolling through something, I can’t even remember what, but the symptoms of PMS catch my eye: body dysmorphia.

As a long time menstruating woman, I’m very familiar with many of the symptoms of PMS. Cramps. Every time. Breast tenderness. Yep. Tiredness. I’m nodding off now. Mood swings. Pretty sure I just yelled at my husband because the oven wasn’t cooking dinner fast enough. Depression. A fact of life at this point. But body dysmorphia — an obsessive focus on a perceived flaw in appearance — this I wasn’t so familiar with.

Now in my thirties, I’m the most comfortable I have ever been in my body. I admire the things it has allowed me to do: carry a child, birth and feed that child, do pull-ups and pushups and deadlift the average weight of a man, run wooded trails and chase after a busy toddler.

Then once a month, there’s this slow feeling, insidious really, as I turn into someone else.

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Invisible Illness
Invisible Illness

Published in Invisible Illness

Medium’s biggest mental health publication

Alaina Ruth
Alaina Ruth

Written by Alaina Ruth

I’m over on substack if you want to subscribe: Alainaruth.substack.com Email: writemelove23@gmail.com Twitter: @peninsuladetail She/her

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