For You: A Menstruation Cry Calendar

Ah, that beautiful transition in your monthly cycle where increasingly the things you cry at shift from understandable to irrational. What a true hormonal delight! And yet somehow – impossibly, really – I forget every month. No more! Here’s a handy guide to track where you are in your menstrual cycle based on what makes you cry and when, so on that day you find yourself tearing up at an air dancer you can check back and see, “Yep, I’m two days away from my period.”

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Erin

Los Angeles based writer. Let's keep it clean out there!

Erin has written 208 articles for us.

42 Comments

  1. I was straight up SOBBING in my living room at that pediatric nurse commercial the other day…if only I’d had this incredibly helpful calendar I would have known in expect my period in 17 days!

  2. I burned rice once and ended up SOBBING in the kitchen while trying to save the pan in the sink.

    TBH I was overworked on the last stretch of my PhD so not sure it was hormones

  4. Well, I almost started crying just imagining half of these things, I guess I’ll be waiting for my period to arrive any minute now.

  5. Since I’ve been on the shot, it’s actually been a while since I’ve had a period. But this calendar still helps!

  6. “Your plant is drooping & you interpret it as being sad” is me like, literally every day of the month, though? I once spent an entire dinner in a restaurant trying to cheer up a really droopy looking daisy that was being held up badly with gardening wire (or whatever that green wire stuff is I’m not a technical person).

  8. NGL, this is very similar to my ‘did you forget to take your meds?’ cry calendar. :P

  9. the bee!!! i think my most ridiculous pms moment was seeing a dying roach in my bathroom, and instead of being like gross, roach, make it stop immediately, i really pondered the most humane thing to do with it. like, it was already dying, so would it be better to end its suffering? or take it outside so it could be at home or at one with nature or something when it died? i don’t think i cried, but i felt some strong feelings. over a roach.

    • This happened to me! Except, I was in the basement of my dorm at 4am after writing a lab report, and a roach ran up on me and I immediately killed it, and instantly felt a sense of doom because that roach was probably gandhi reincarnate and since then I transport bugs outside and set them free, because gandhi.

      I cried for a while.

    • I gotta kill spiders really fast or I start feeling bad for them because they’re just hanging out at home in my bathtub and they’re doing the best they can with what they have which is not a lot because they’re spiders and what if they have a friend and the friendspider never knows what happened to other spider because one day they’re just GONE and then they’re sad and lonely and confused–did other spider secretly hate them? were they ever really friends? are they ever coming back? are they going to be alone forever?

      • if they’re tiny enough, i go in for live & let live with spiders, but big fast ones in my house freak me out. i’m afraid to try catch & release because what if they crawl on me! can’t deal.

          • the one time i managed to capture a really quick biggish spider, i let him loose outside my door…and then noticed a considerably larger spider creeping in the shadows. i choose to believe that i didn’t liberate a spider from my home just for it to get eaten immediately. he is fiiiiine. probably bouncing his spider grandkids on his knee right now telling them the story of the nice human who helped him get outside that one time.

        • Yass be free cute little lizard and eat mosquitoes.
          All of the mosquitoes. >_>

          Is it still beautiful now that I admit it’s there’s agenda?
          I’m terrible in my honesty.
          so terrible

          But geckos and anoles are not.

          • dude i live in mississippi. i feel you on the mosquito woes. that is a worthy agenda. worthy indeed. it is still very beautiful. a plan that makes everyone happy!

          • I forgot that for momentarily…well then a neighborly high five to the worthiness and beauty of mah lizard saving equals lizards reducing mosquito agenda
            A platform all these States can proudly get behind.
            Happiness for all!
            Except for mosquitoes.

  10. oh god, my roommate and i both cried over a Frog and Toad story today, and then i spilled water on my bed and teared up, and then we sobbed at some song on nashville. i don’t even like nashville?

    the bleeding. it’s coming.

  11. The bee thing is so real. Breaks my damn heart. I once saw a whole bunch of them laying dead in the fallen blossom under a tree, I was out walking the dog and cried the whole way home…dignified silent tears…but yeah. I don’t know if that was hormones, or clinical depression, or just the existential dread of the fact that without them we all die.

  12. Last week while my uterus decided to go full metal on me and tear itself apart, I cried after pealing an onion and not because of the syn-propanethial-S-oxide it releases. For some reason I started thinking that the only reason onions make you cry is to make you stop hurting them. The onions were basically crying out to try and make me feel remorse for causing them so much pain. My period made me feel like a monster for peeling a root and I wasn’t even high. I haven’t been able to enjoy my onion rings since.

  13. I once started crying in a cafe because they served me a different type of tea than the one I had asked for.

    Of course, it turned out to be the day before my period – a day I think of as the Coldplay Day of Emotions. All Coldplay songs just seem so TRUE on that day, and I bet once they are done writing songs about pain and thwarted life-dreams they will turn to songs about sad tea.

  14. I get the opposite or at least opposite adjacent of crying and somehow misread or misinterpreted “air dancers” as “Sky Dancers” aka a beautiful girly as heck toy from the 90’s that got recalled because their wings could smack the snot out a person/give a concussion.
    I miss those beautiful yet deadly toys enough to tear up…maybe.

    Where’s the “nostalgia for bright spot of my child hood” on that calendar? Is that an equivalent to “seeing picture of your parents when they were younger” perhaps?

  16. So can I understand the asterisk on period day as a joker symbol and that I’ll gonna cry about about everything on that day? Good. Because today was period day. ^^

  17. laughed at this until i literally cried in my cabin at camp (while on my period). two enthusiastic thumbs up!

    • i was doing the same thing in my cabin without the laughing which means we’re spiritually connected now

  18. Where is the “life is meaningless and we all die alone so why try” day or do I need to see my doctor about that

      • On the first day of camp Nikki and Cecelia asked the Lions Club cabin one thing we were excited about and one thing we were nervous about and I was like

        “I’VE NEVER HAD QUEER LADY FRIENDS also I’m PMSing this week so I might just not get out of bed one day and then stare at the wall existentially for a few hours” and their nervous laughter / this calendar leads me to believe that maybe I’m on all the wrong meds

  19. I know this was posted like two full historical eras ago, but I just had my monthly cry-for-no-reason day at work yesterday and this made me laugh SO HARD!!!!!!
    Also, I’m in perimenopause, which lasts years, apparently, and at least I finally realized wtf was going on with this monthly cry-fest. This calendar and comments makes me wonder why I’m not doing more crying, though. Is it the meds?

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