looking back at the first two years

I am four years past my last period now and I was thinking this week about the early part of it, which I did not handle especially well, not because I was dramatic but because I kept trying to reason my way through things that were not really rational problems. The anxiety was the part I least expected. I had read about the physical symptoms and thought I had a reasonable picture. I had not anticipated waking up with a chest that felt like something was about to go wrong, on days when nothing was going wrong. That took a long time to connect to anything hormonal because it felt so specifically like worry, like I must be worried about something and just could not locate what. Food helped more than I expected. Not in a curative way, just in a stabilising way. Eating properly in the morning made the afternoons less strange. That sounds obvious written down. The brain fog came and went. I kept a book by the bed and some months I could read thirty pages and some months I read the same paragraph four times and gave up. I stopped judging the low-reading months eventually. What I would tell myself from that time is that the symptoms do not all peak together and they do not all resolve together either. Some things got better before others. Some things I stopped noticing rather than them actually stopping. I am not sure there is a clear line between those two things.