It began with a podcast

How a voice in my headphones began the wildest journey of my life.

I was sitting outside my house in the depths of a depressive episode when I first heard a woman speak openly about PMDD.

I was trying to find a podcast episode to calm my brain while I walked, but I couldn’t stand to listen to any of my usual shows. I felt so completely hopeless that listening to one more person talk about discipline or entrepreneurship or mindfulness would have sent me into a total f**king meltdown.

My friend had recommended Dr. Jolene Brighten’s podcast, the Dr. Brighten Show, and I’d been putting off listening to it for weeks. But that day, I decided I was finally ready to face this **thing** that had been plaguing me since I was 12 years old.

She began describing everything she felt, thought, and experienced, connecting it to real neuroscience and biology.

I was floored.

She mapped everything I’d thought was my problem, my personality, and my inability to get my sh*t together to real hormonal, neurological, and biological factors.

PMD-whaaaaaattt?

After 60 minutes, my life was forever changed. My 16-month journey of forgiveness and compassion for my PMDD had begun. But it was a long, winding, confusing, and incredibly painful road, friend.

Those first few months, I’d think I was doing everything “right,” only to have my symptoms come crashing back around me each month. I obsessed over getting rid of them; my definition of success was to be totally symptom-free, to get to a place where I could be like “PMD-whaaaaaattt??”

I believed I’d only be truly happy and have the life I dreamed of if I eliminated my symptoms entirely. Yet after months of banging my head against a proverbial wall, I understood that fighting my PMDD was a battle I would always lose.

I’d been treating my body like an enemy to overcome. Yet all along it was the guide I needed to begin listening to.

There were so many interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions to my PMDD that went way beyond getting enough sleep and taking magnesium.

When I began connecting the experience in my luteal to my choices in my follicular, I saw that there were so many unloving decisions I was making each month without even realizing it.

I was living in survival in dozens of small (and massive) ways I didn’t even realize were causing so much harm: sticking with a freelance job with a boss who constantly violated my boundaries, not speaking up for myself, putting off my dreams, overworking, people-pleasing, and living in old patterns that drained all my energy. I’d run my spirit and body ragged every follicular, so of course I would crash and burn every luteal.

When I finally met my symptoms with compassion and understanding—along with clinical and non-clinical interventions, which I’ll share about in different episodes—my symptoms began to change.

Why of course™?

There is more and more information about PMDD symptom management in the world—incredible humans sharing deep, complex medical knowledge and science about PMDD (like @arc.woman and Dr. Brighten), and I’m so happy to see this kind of information finally being shared.

So I thought to myself, as a non-doctor, what could I bring to this community?

Because at a certain point in my journey, I didn’t need more tips or education. I didn’t need someone else to tell me whether I was okay or doing the right thing.

What I most deeply needed was to trust myself again, no matter what life or PMDD threw at me. So I decided to create a podcast about repairing our relationship with ourselves and our people, not just fixing our symptoms.

But first, I needed a name. I noodled on it for weeks, until one day it came to me like lightning: of course.

Because wherever you are in age, life, or chapter of your story—the terrible, the confusing, or the complicated—of course.

You have never been the problem, my friend.

Every episode is dedicated to one of the many shame-spiral-inducing, “who the f am I” aspects of PMDD, like: trauma, rage, sensory sensitivity, HPA-axis dysregulation, boundary setting, and why asking for help feels impossible.

Where to go from here?

Stay tuned for when the first episode launches on the podcast tab very soon. In the meantime, if you’d like to join as a free or paid subscriber, add your email below.

When you become a subscriber, you can expect a weekly email in your inbox with the episode, transcript, and show notes, plus bonus handouts I’ve created for certain topics.

Welcome to the community, friend

All of you makes sense here.

Of course exists to rebuild your relationship with yourself, your body, and your people.

So you can work with your symptoms instead of hating them, while building a toolkit to heal the years of shame and confusion that being undiagnosed has etched into your nervous system.

And never forget:

PMDD is what we have, not who we are… because we are not our symptoms.

Xoxo, Savannah ✨🩵💫