On Being Moody

They said I was too emotional. Too sensitive. Too much.

For years, I believed them. I tracked my failures — the days I couldn’t focus, the weeks I couldn’t create, the months I felt like a fraud. I built spreadsheets of my own inadequacy.

Then, at 29, someone finally gave it a name: PMDD. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder.

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The pattern I didn’t see

Every month, like clockwork: two weeks of fire, two weeks of fog. The fire felt like me. The fog felt like punishment.

But here’s what nobody tells you about PMDD — once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you start to wonder: what if the fog isn’t a bug? What if it’s just a different mode?

What I stopped doing

I stopped fighting the fog. I stopped scheduling launches during my luteal phase. I stopped comparing my Tuesday self to my Saturday self. I stopped calling myself lazy when my brain was literally running on different chemistry.

What I started doing

I started tracking. Not just symptoms — creative output. Energy. Ideas. Confidence. I started mapping my moods to my cycle, and what I found was not chaos. It was rhythm.

The world told moody women to calm down. I decided to build something with it instead.

The tool I built

That’s how Patterns was born. Not from a business plan. From desperation, honestly. From opening yet another period tracker that asked me about cramps but not about whether I could make a single decision that day.

I learned to code for this. Me — the business school girl, the one who was “not technical.” I sat down and taught myself because no one was building what I needed.

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This is the first essay in what I hope becomes a longer conversation. About moods. About cycles. About creating anyway.

On est ensemble.