Bloody hell
Theatre-maker, director and live artist Heather Marshall explains how the kindness of strangers helped to harness her personal rage.
Illustration by Fiona McDonnell. Words by Heather Marshall.
A woman on Facebook saved my life. I had been in bed for three days. I hadn’t left my room in four. Thank God for the ensuite bathroom where I crawled every few hours to go to the toilet and get a drink of water. I wanted to die. That was what was going to happen. I was quite prepared for it. I couldn’t bear the fear, anger and the other indescribable feelings that were going round inside my brain. It felt as if the insides of my head were being squeezed in.
At the same time someone was wringing out my womb. I have depression, and anxiety, and I’m used to having a couple of desperate days in bed every few months. But this was an entirely new feeling.
Everything and everyone made me anxious. My anxiety comes out as anger, which had been a surprise at first. I thought anxiety would make me anxious. But when anxious, I fly into a rage.
The only thing I could bear was Gilmore Girls and I had been lying for nearly three days with my eyes closed listening to their fast-paced nonsense dialogue. Gilmore Girls and bed were safe.
Anything else was not. I knew this wasn’t normal. And I needed to find someone who understood.
I posted on my Facebook: “Does anyone else with depression and anxiety feel really ill, like much much worse than normal around their period? Not just pain but really awful and down.”
“Yeah I do hun, just take some painkillers.”
“Omg totally. Go to the gym it makes everything better.”
“What you need is to get into a routine. Go to the gym, healthy body, healthy mind.”
“You really need to think about your diet. If you just eat chocolate around the time of your period then obviously you’re going to feel shit.”
“I think it sounds like you have pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder. I understand. Please go to the doctors immediately. This will pass but you need help. It will get better. I’m here if you need to talk. Beth x.”
Beth was a friend of a friend. I’d only met her twice. But in that moment, she felt like a lifeline. I quite honestly believe that she saved my life that day. I made an appointment with my doctor and started reading everything I could about pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), relieved that there was a name for what I was experiencing and that I wasn’t going slowly insane. Thanks to the Vicious Cycle, a brilliant project dedicated to raising awareness of PMDD and extreme PMS, I discovered that one in every 20 people of menstruating age are affected by PMDD. That’s around 800,000 of us in the UK.
People with PMDD have normal hormone levels but are abnormally sensitive to fluctuations of oestrogen and progesterone, hormones that occur as part of the menstrual cycle. As the supply of hormones changes during the cycle the body responds by lowering or stopping production of serotonin. The list of symptoms was so familiar to me. There was hopelessness, persistent sadness, depression. Anxiety. Decreased interest in usual activities – I had made so many excuses to avoid friends and barely went to the theatre anymore. Sleeping much more, or much less than usual. Very low self esteem. Lack of focus. Food cravings. Binge eating. Suicidal thoughts. Extreme anger.
I’m not a violent person – I hide behind my pillow when a fight scene comes on the TV. But there’s been times where I’ve visualised grabbing someone’s hair, yanking them down and smacking their head off the floor. Knowing this was part of the condition made sense to me. But vividly picturing hurting someone in that way was disturbing. I’ve never acted on these thoughts but the fear that I could was there.
That fear, along with experiencing suicidal thoughts, propelled me to seek help. I’d love to say that I went to the doctor and they referred me for treatment and that now I’m cured, but nothing is ever that simple - especially for a condition that is seen as a ‘woman’s thing’.
There is no physical test for PMDD. The condition can’t be diagnosed by a blood test. The only way to be diagnosed is to keep a diary of your cycle and your emotions over a three month period. Instead diagnosis means a long conversation with your doctor, which with an underfunded NHS in which keeping a consistent GP is a relative luxury, is something I found near-impossible. I kept researching online and discovered that whilst PMDD primarily affects my mental health, it also impacts physically in ways I’d never expected but that made sense to me. Achy joints. Nausea. Asthma worsening.
What I didn’t understand was why I hadn’t heard of PMDD already and why my doctors didn’t know more about it? Vicious Cycle, told me that 60% of women with PMDD have had to diagnose themselves via Google and 10% of women were told by their doctors that PMDD didn’t exist. At this point I got angry. Not PMDD-angry, but “this is bullshit and I need to do something about it” angry.
So I did the only thing I know how to do and decided to make a show. A show that raises awareness and opens dialogues and conversations about PMDD. It’s not the first time I’ve used theatre or live art as a platform to raise awareness. I created the show Hey, I’m Alive! about cystic fibrosis after learning about the condition through a participant. Desperation Bingo (which won the Fringe Zeitgeist Award) exposed ATOS and the PIP benefit assessments as inhumane, and was in part inspired by my mum’s experiences of being assessed for her disability benefits.
But this felt even more personal. I started with Wasting My Womb which was produced as part of the Traverse Theatre’s Hothouse Season. It was received well and started a conversation but I knew it needed to be bolder.
I made the decision to strip it back and be more honest with what I was creating, with the aim that people with similar mental health experiences could connect. I looked through my diaries from when I was experiencing a particularly bad episode of PMDD and depression. The words felt alien yet familiar. Because I was mentally much healthier it was hard to believe that I’d ever felt so low..
The work I created was a raw, durational piece that ran over nine hours and allowed audiences to come and go. Each time they visited they would see how my mental health impacted at different points in my cycle. I named it Sinking Horses after the horse in the quicksand of sadness in The Never-Ending Story. The show was well received and got good reviews but more importantly it got people talking. I would hear the audience discussing the piece in the performance space. For others it was too much — perhaps I was too honest.
“Thinking things I can’t even write
How can one day be ok and another like this
No black clouds or dogs
Just robotic
Because I keep going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
And going
But I want to be gone.”
What I learnt from Sinking Horses is that there needs to be a little distance between the writer and the audience — that you can’t give too much of yourself away. I still wanted to keep raising awareness of PMDD in the hope that others might recognise it in themselves or a friend or family member but I had to ensure it was accessible. I needed to keep developing the work.
That’s why I’m now working with Maltese sister duo The New Victorians, who create beautiful electro scores for theatre. We plan to create a period drama about periods. It’s going to be messy (because periods are), upbeat and most importantly accessible. It’s not just for people who have periods but for people who have experienced periods in some form – because we all have. Heather Marshall works under the name Creative Electric. If you think you might have PMDD you should contact your GP.
Heather Marshall works under the name Creative Electric.
