A note before you read: this essay is about cyclical living and the female hormonal cycle specifically. If you’re a man who reads my work — and many of you do — stay with it. What I’m describing has everything to do with the women in your life, and possibly with why certain weeks feel like a different person entirely. Learning to be in relationship with every version of the women in your life can give you an entirely new experience.
There is a week in my cycle where I wake up certain that everything is wrong.
Not anxious. Not spiraling. Certain. The refrigerator is wrong. The business decision I made in spring was wrong. The thing I said yes to last month was wrong. Everything I’ve been tolerating is wrong.
I am usually correct.
For a long time I treated this week like a problem to manage. I’d apologize for being difficult. I’d wait for it to pass. I’d wonder, quietly, whether I was regressing — whether all the work I’d done on myself was dissolving, because here I was again, sad and critical and wanting to burn everything down.
I don’t think that anymore.
After ovulation, estrogen drops. Progesterone rises briefly, then falls. The body is registering, at the hormonal level, that it did not get pregnant. And the entire eco-system starts the work of releasing what it made. Shedding the lining. Clearing the field. Getting ready to begin again.
The body is in a destructive phase.
There’s a subtle energy that arises, it feels like you failed. Which is hard to ignore when you entire external world is always telling you that.
Not young enough. Not thin enough. Too many wrinkles. Too hard. Too soft. This season of your cycle comes in on top of all that constant noise.
The natural response of wanting to burn it all down and remove every annoyance isn’t brokenness.
It’s just what’s happening.
It happens every month whether you name it or not.
For the men reading: what looks like volatility in this phase is usually accuracy. She can see problems clearly that she genuinely couldn’t access last week. Trying to manage her back to the version of herself she was ten days ago is going to cost you both.
I was on a coaching call recently — I was on a nearly identical cycle day as the woman I was speaking with — and I said something I say often: the luteal phase is your most psychic time. Your emotions are hair-trigger. Your tolerance is low. Your dreams get vivid and strange.
And underneath all of that, you can see problems clearly that you couldn’t see last week when you were full of estrogen and momentum and the particular blindness of feeling good. Aiming toward feeling good all the time is an Achilles heel.
The most important part: You’re not supposed to act on what you see. Not yet.
You’re supposed to catalog it. Write it down. Let the low tolerance do what it’s actually for — cutting into whatever is genuinely wrong — and trust that the energy to fix those things will arrive when it’s supposed to. In the reflective phase, solutions start to surface. In the follicular, they begin to bloom. In the ovulatory, you have the aliveness to move.
I don’t know if it’s realistic for every woman to move on a cycle as strictly as I do but I do believe if you are unaware of your biology it controls you. You’ll spend your entire life feeling like something is wrong. You’ll never learn to use your hormones. They are so useful.
But right now you can see. That’s what this week is.
I wrote something for myself during luteal phase that I don’t use any other time of the month: I use the sword of my intolerance to cut deep. I hold my vision.
The women I’ve watched move through their lives with the most power — older, grounded, a little ruthless about their own rhythms — they treat this week like a resource. The crone women who use the moon after their cycles wane.
They record their dreams. They write down everything that’s wrong. They’re indulging darkness because they understand that this information is going to fund the next three weeks of their life, and they won’t have access to it again for a month. It is so valuable to be able to see so clearly.
So when the luteal phase arrives and everything feels like evidence of failure, I stop and ask: what can I see right now that I won’t be able to see next week?
Not in a spiraling way. In a catalog way. What’s actually wrong? Where am I stuck? What have I been tolerating? What do my kids need from me? What does my work need from me? Where am I leaking in my partnership?
Notice it’s not about what is wrong with other people. It’s what do I need to see.
I write it down. I don’t try to fix it. I watch the enormous general feeling of doom distill into two or three specific, solvable things.
Then I wait.
The season passes. My cycle starts. Something quiets. And I still have the list.
I used to dread this week.
Now I catch myself mid-cycle — full of estrogen, moving fast, feeling good — thinking: I wish I could see this clearly right now. I wish had the sharp sword of knowing exactly what to cut.
When there’s something I can’t quite get to the bottom of and I know I’ll have to wait for it.
When you stop fighting the rhythm, you start to want what each phase actually gives you, even the hard ones.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.