THE CRAZIEST BITCH IN TOWN

The pain materialized in my heart, mind, and body simultaneously and consumed my every gesture.

I never really understood why Plan B is not meant to be used as a contraceptive until I took it. What differentiates it? Other forms of hormonal contraceptives can make your cycle irregular, affect your mental health, and come with a slew of potential side effects. Why shouldn’t I take Plan B at the first sign of trouble?

And for a while, I did. Every time something slightly off occurred in my sexual encounter, even if the condom just felt slightly weird, I’d take a Plan B. In my eyes, there was no side effect that could be more painful than becoming pregnant. I didn’t want to leave it to chance. At the time, I assumed that any amount of uncertainty or worry would be stressful enough for my partner and I that any physical experience of Plan B would be preferable. Even to this day, I wouldn’t hesitate to take a Plan B if I knew that something went wrong during sex. 

This all changed, however, when I coincidentally felt uncertain about sex three times consecutively. Within the span of a few weeks, I chose to take three Plan Bs. I ultimately believed that it was a necessity–my partner and I couldn’t bear the possibility of pregnancy. I could see the anxiety destroying him, destroying me, destroying us. So, I bore the pain of the mistakes we had made in my body. I placed that tension in my physical system so that it could be displaced from our hearts. I could handle whatever reproductive symptoms were thrown at me, right?

Unfortunately, however, it was not so simple. It was an unfortunate coincidence that I was taking Plan Bs while I was already struggling with the beginnings of a deep depression. I was already at an isolated, in-between moment in my life, spending my first summer away from home and missing my family, missing the lives that I had been able to live prior. The pain materialized in my heart, mind, and body simultaneously and consumed my every gesture. I became physically fatigued, and I would go to work only to spend hours attempting to focus on simple tasks. 

The heaviness of my heart intensified more than I ever really knew it could, and I began sobbing uncontrollably pretty much daily. I was so confused about what had happened to me–I wondered if I had lost the most bright and beautiful parts of myself forever. I couldn’t enjoy work anymore, couldn’t think straight. I was fighting with my partner all the time. I was cosmically alone. I felt so irrational all the time, despising myself for the changes and wondering if it could ever be different.

Yet unfortunately, it didn’t even ease my mind about pregnancy as I needed it to. The worst part of Plan B symptoms, in my opinion, is that they mirror pregnancy symptoms. I was dealing with withdrawal bleeding that could appear to be like implantation bleeding, my period left me for a few months, and a number of the occurrences in my body could be interpreted as early pregnancy symptoms. When I lost my period, I lost a central source of information about my health, and I had no way of knowing when it would return. I impatiently awaited its arrival, drinking mugwort tea and checking at the slightest sign of bleeding, but nothing helped. I wasn’t back into a steady rhythm until nine weeks later. That being said, my partner and I drove ourselves crazy over whether I was pregnant anyway.

I thought that I really was the craziest bitch in town until I went online and read about other women’s experiences, encompassing fatigue, depression, anxiety, and relationship struggles. I thought that I was the only one in the world to be destroyed in such an all-encompassing way by a pill, and I thought that I could never recover.

AUTHOR: Catherine Du
ARTIST: Sunny Cho