Why coming off contraception is the most liberating thing you can do

Using a menstrual tracker app was the difference between dangerously shaming myself for a freak spur of social anxiety & self-hatred, and and realising how fucking important self-love is & that it’s OK to have down days.

So let me start this by clarifying that until about four months ago, like many young women, I hadn’t had a natural hormone cycle since being a teenager (I’m now 25).

When I was 16, I started on the pill. It was a combined pill under the brand name ‘Rigevidon’, and frankly, I didn’t really give a shit when it came down to big pharma and/or possible effects of taking contraception. I’d taken another step into the world of being a big girl so it seemed pretty dope to have this daily reminder at 15:00, and besides, I was having sex already so it was of course my responsibility to avoid getting pregnant.

The pill came with other fantastic extras too — I could strategically delay my period if I thought it would clash with my summer holiday. Just keep hounding those pills daily, forget what the nurse said about having a week off between every cycle. Consequences? What consequences? No-one wants to be padding up to get their bikini on, and as a fairly fresh hormonal girl, I was not trusting a tampon to keep me from turning the swimming pool pink.

Although that has never happened to me, it’s actually a pretty terrifying concept when you’re 16 and your personal image is e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

I used the pill for the next five years. A lot of women experience some pretty rough side effects: acne, depression, anxiety — I had low periods, but I had it quite easy compared to some. I gained a bit of chunk, which I suppose in hand made me a little bit extra insecure, but other than that I didn’t have a bad ride.

The mum of one of my closest friends had beaten breast cancer when we were younger. When we moved to University, we lived together, and I’ll always remember our conversation about her using a different contraceptive pill to me. She couldn’t use mine because it ‘could’ heighten her risk of breast cancer, and this was the first time I actually considered what I was doing to my body.

If it’s that bad for her to take, surely it can’t be good for me?

I remember when I chose the pill that I did. The nurse simply had to tell me: “this is a pill you can take, you must use contraception if you’re having regular sex”. Weighing up the options of pregnancy, sticking a plastic prod in my arm, a sharp looking metal object up my vagina, or needle in my butt every three months, well, swallowing a tiny little sugar-coated innocent-looking pill every day didn’t seem so harmful.

In any consumer industry other than receiving medical care, I question the fuck out of the people responsible for giving me a product, so why when it comes to my health and my own well-being do I not?

Firstly: I admire and appreciate sexual health clinics/workers, but the businesses that stock their shelves, not so much.

Secondly: I think at such a time/age in my life, it was more a priority to simply have contraception, and worry about potential side effects later. Nobody really stressed to me the possible consequences of such a high consumption of unnatural hormones, nor messing with my own natural hormones and cycle to such an extreme. At the time, I had never experienced depression, so looking after my mental health didn’t seem so important/difficult to me.

NOTE: There’s a really great piece on Bustle about pills, menstruation + synthetic hormonal side effects if you’re wondering about it.

The pill I used to take actually made headlines over the past few years, being a suggested contribution to a rise in blood clots among young women — even the NHS released information about the issue.

According to (more than I had hoped) news sources, a number of deaths have even been related to the Rigevidon-blood clot issue. But the thing is, it was already registered as a possible side effect, so should we be considering these way more than we’re told to?

A close friend of mine had a similar experience recently, she’s an air hostess for Virgin Atlantic so does a lot of long-haul flights. She’d been taking Rigevidon for years, and was rushed to hospital following one of her flights last year due to a clot. After that, she stopped using hormone-inducing contraceptives altogether and started using a period tracker app called Flo.

I was always really crap at remembering to take my pill, so when things started getting serious with my boyfriend in my second year of Uni I decided to turn it up a notch. Two weeks before Valentine’s day I attended an appointment to shove a four-inch plastic stick in my arm, better known as ‘the implant’. Romantic gesture, I know.

The bonuses? I didn’t have to remember to take the pill every goddamn day, it would last for three years worry-free, and best of all, after about 8 months of ‘spotting’, my periods would eventually stop altogether for a whole year.

A WHOLE YEAR.

Little did I know that three years on, the last aspect that I mentioned of this little bundle of synthetic joy would actually play a huge role in my decision to go contraception free.

I’d had quite bad PMS when I was younger which was tamed slightly by the pill, so I was anxious to see what my reaction to the implant would be.

Similar to the pill, when considering getting the implant, to put it simply, the side-effects are played down as fuck.

This is what the NHS tells you:

So they mention ‘mood swings’ during the first few weeks. Seriously? I suppose for most cases, you cannot definitively say something caused your depression or caused you to have social anxiety, therefore we cannot blame a specific source. But when so many women I knew had claimed they suffered with their mental health because of the hormonal effects of the implant, I decided to go forward with caution.

It’s safe to say that in the first few weeks, the mood swings were apparent, causing a near-break-up on Valentine’s Day. I’d get irrational, paranoid, and hyper-emotional. Sometimes it felt like I had my most extreme PMS for weeks on end, but over the following months this died down.

Although we broke up about a year after that, I decided to keep my implant in place for the full three years, and eventually entered another relationship while still hosting my little plastic pal.

After three years, I had accepted my implant as a part of me. Only now and then would I really think about it and how weird it felt that this little dude had been pumping hormones into me every day for an eighth of my life, other than that I appreciated its contributions to my baby-free sex life.

I was given a friendly reminder that my time with my new friend was coming to an end, when an old friend I’d forgotten about made a crimson comeback in my pants.

I was surprised to find myself pleased to see my period return, but suddenly realised how unnatural it was that I hadn’t had one for a year.

With this reaction, I knew before even removing my implant that I didn’t want it replacing.

But which avenue to take next?

I weighed up my options for a really long time. When I went into the nurse’s office at the clinic to get my implant removed, having learned to respect my body a bit more since my teen years, I was sure to ask her everything she knew about each option.

I felt mad that there was such pressure to continue pumping synthetic hormones into my body, and after almost 10 years since having a natural cycle, I wanted to know what ‘normal’ felt like again.

In the end, I decided to take a packet of pills and a bunch of condoms from her, still unsure as to which contraceptive route I wanted to take — if any — plus the decision was my boyfriend’s (almost) as much as mine.

I remembered back to my friend mentioning that period app she used, and how she’d said she used it along with condoms when necessary instead of taking contraceptives. To be clear — I’m not endorsing this method, nor does the app state anywhere that it’s 100% foolproof, but as well as learning a shit ton about the somehow-still-taboo topic of menstruation, the more you use it the more accurately it claims to tell you when you basically won’t fall preggers from a quick bounce.

I soon discovered that there’s tons of them out there and they’re all really fucking empowering for women. The only people they’re screwing are the ones profiting from the $20+ billion contraceptives industry.

We decided to trial a month (or a few) without using female contraceptive methods, to see how we liked the app and more importantly for me to see any changes in myself, and decide how I felt about it.

Like clockwork, my period became regular again. In the last few months of my implant my period had been lasting between three and 11 days, sometimes returning after two days off. So this was a nice aspect, but other than that I hadn’t really noticed any changes.

Now with these apps, you have the option to enter in extra daily info that will be considered in giving you the most accurate period updates. You can document your moods, whether you had sex, literally even whether you masturbated or wanna put in a daily diary entry on the characteristics of your discharge.

It wasn’t until the other day when I’d been struggling with an array of emotions for no apparent reason (I’d been productive, happy, anxious, paranoid, self-deprecating, scared, and sad in literally a matter of hours), and had already been regularly using Flo & entering my moods for the past three months, that I realised something:

I was normal again.

I went to enter my struggle on Flo, only to find that I was two days away from my period. It suddenly clicked that last month — coming up to my second non-induced period — I experienced an almost creepily similar day. I went from having a real dandy morning to inexplicably crying, getting mad at the laundry, and questioning my self-worth in the afternoon. Just like this time, it came two days before my period.

Sure, the emotions were not the most positive. But it felt beyond good to know that all of that shit talk I was giving myself for skipping plans to sit in alone wondering why I’m so boring was actually hormonal, and what I’m going through isn’t my fault.

It wasn’t one of the happiest rollercoaster rides I’ve been on, but there was a strangely euphoric feeling that came with experiencing legit PMS for the first time in almost a decade.

Having my natural period again reminded me of an incredibly important thing: Yes, listening to your feelings is IMPORTANT, but it’s equally important to consider where they’ve come from, what they mean, and why they’re there. Listening to myself say there’s something wrong with me made me feel like complete and utter shit. Being able to understand where the thought came from saved me.

It’s not news that the entire concept of female contraception & the responsibility that women are practically forced to take is bullshit, but the more we talk about it the better.

And we are talking about it.

Going contraception free seems a bit scary, but if you’re careful with it, trialling it out can be an incredibly healthy insight into better understanding and helping yourself.