Hi Reader

Last week I wrote about the menstrual cycle as something much bigger than the few days each month that we bleed.

This week I want to tell you why I care about this subject quite so much.​
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Because my relationship with my menstrual cycle hasn't always looked the way it does now. In fact, for a very long time, I barely had a relationship with it at all.

I went on the contraceptive pill when I was 15 because my periods were incredibly painful. And I think this is important. At 15, I hadn't been taught anything meaningful about my menstrual cycle. Not at school, not really anywhere else. I knew periods happened, obviously, but I didn't understand hormones, the different phases of the cycle, what symptoms might be telling us or that there might even be questions worth asking about why I was in so much pain.

So I went to the doctor. I was essentially told, here are some pills, and off I went. And of course I followed that advice. I was 15. I naively assumed that if a doctor was giving me something for the problem, that was simply what you did.

Looking back now, I wish I'd been given more information alongside that option. Not because I'm anti-contraception, and certainly not because I think my 15-year-old self should have somehow known better, but because I wish somebody had helped me understand the body I was going to be living in for the rest of my life.

Instead, I stayed on hormonal contraception for years without really knowing very much about my natural menstrual cycle at all.

It wasn't until much later, when I eventually decided to come off it, that I really started learning about what had been happening underneath the surface. And that's when my relationship with my menstrual cycle properly began.​
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And it wasn't an easy transition.

My periods initially took a while to return and, when they did, my cycles were all over the place. I experienced painful cramps, really bad folliculitis all over my thighs, bum and back, huge emotional fluctuations and, at one point, what felt like PMS for an enormous chunk of the month.

It would have been very easy at that point to decide that my menstrual cycle was the problem. For a while, I probably did. But over time, my perspective started to change.

Rather than only asking, How do I make these symptoms go away?, I became much more curious about what was happening around them.

What was my body responding to?

What patterns could I see?

What helped?

What made things worse?

And perhaps most importantly, what was the rest of my life asking from my body at the same time?

Because there was quite a lot going on.

When I qualified as a solicitor in 2022, I was already edging towards burnout. I was working in defendant litigation, dealing with the unpredictability that naturally comes with that type of work, last-minute things being dropped into my day, deadlines and a requirement to hit seven billable hours. Then add a fairly healthy dose of newly-qualified-lawyer imposter syndrome into the mix and my internal pressure was enormous.

I didn't just want to do the job. I wanted to prove I was good at it.

So if my body was tired, I pushed. If my concentration wasn't there, I became frustrated with myself. If I needed more recovery, I interpreted that as something I needed to overcome.

And when my menstrual symptoms became harder at certain points in the month, the question in my head was essentially: How do I make my body cooperate with the life I've decided it needs to live?

I don't think I realised at the time how backwards that question was. Eventually I burned out and left law altogether. If you'd spoken to me then, I was pretty convinced I would never be a lawyer again.

I spent the next couple of years focusing much more seriously on my health, training as a health coach, learning about stress, nutrition, behaviour, hormones and the nervous system, and (probably most importantly) learning about myself.

And somewhere along the way, the question changed.

It stopped being: How do I make myself fit this life?

And became: How do I create a life that actually works with me?

That distinction has followed me all the way back into law. Because, as you know if you've been reading these emails for a while, I did eventually go back.

I love being a solicitor. I like intellectually challenging work. I like responsibility. I like solving difficult problems, working with clients and being part of a team.

Understanding myself better didn't make me want a life without pressure. It made me much more thoughtful about which pressures I was willing to carry and how I wanted to carry them.

When I returned, I deliberately chose claimant work because I felt the nature of the work gave me a little more of the control I was looking for.

There are still urgent things, deadlines and billable hours. There are absolutely still days when the beautifully organised plan in my head gets completely rearranged by something more pressing!

But I generally feel I have more control over the type of work I'm doing and, where circumstances allow, when I do certain things. And that gives me room to work with myself rather than constantly trying to overpower myself.

I want to be careful here because I don't mean that I organise my entire working month around my menstrual cycle. I don't decline a deadline because I'm luteal. Nor do I tell a client they'll have to wait until my follicular phase because apparently that's when I'm supposed to be more productive.

Real life doesn't work like that.

And I actually think some menstrual-cycle content online can accidentally create another impossible standard for women, as though the only way to "work with your cycle" is to have complete control over your diary, work for yourself and schedule every presentation, workout and difficult conversation according to your hormones.

Most of us can't do that. I certainly can't.

Working with yourself doesn't mean creating a perfectly controlled life. Sometimes it means understanding your patterns well enough that you can support yourself within the life you actually have.

If I know I'm having a lower-energy day, perhaps I don't add another three unnecessary things to the evening.

If I'm feeling more emotionally reactive, I can notice that without immediately deciding everything in my life is terrible.

If work is particularly demanding, I can pay more attention to sleep, food, recovery and the things outside work that are within my control.

And if something genuinely needs doing? I do it.

This isn't about telling women that they're incapable for half of every month. Quite the opposite.​
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For me, understanding my cycle has helped me stop wasting so much energy fighting myself. And that's probably the biggest thing I want you to take from my story.

You don't necessarily have to choose between the life you want and the needs of your body. Sometimes you have to get creative about how the two coexist.

Maybe the idealised version you once imagined needs adjusting slightly.

Maybe the career stays but the boundaries change.

Maybe the training stays but the frequency changes.

Maybe the ambition stays but the way you pursue it becomes kinder.

Maybe you stop asking yourself to perform exactly the same way every day and start recognising that flexibility isn't the same thing as weakness.

I've had to do this in lots of areas of my life. And ironically, I feel far more capable now than I did when I was constantly trying to prove how much I could cope with.

My menstrual cycle didn't make me leave law. And understanding it didn't make me abandon ambition. It became one of many pieces of information that helped me understand what I need in order to have both my health and a career I genuinely enjoy.

I'm still learning. There are still months where things feel different. There are still times when I realise I've been pushing too hard and think, Catherine, how many times are we going to learn this lesson?

But there's a lot less fighting now. And a lot more curiosity.

Which is a much nicer way to live in your own body.

Next week I'm going to tell you about a conversation I recently had with my boss about menstrual cycles (yes, menstrual cycles, with my male boss) because it reminded me how valuable it can be simply to have these conversations openly, particularly in professions where women's health hasn't always been the easiest thing to talk about.

But for now, I want to leave you with the question that changed things for me: Where in your life are you trying to force yourself to fit something, when perhaps the something could be adjusted to fit you too?

You don't need to completely change your career, your routine or your life.

Sometimes a small adjustment is enough to stop fighting yourself quite so hard.

With care and wellness,

Cat