‘Irrational’ is a word often used to dismiss and undermine womenMorgueFile

I can be pretty irrational. I am also a woman. In a lot of people’s eyes, this makes me a bit of a problem.

My hormones have a big effect on me. In the week or so before my period (yes, I said the p-word, don’t call the police!) I experience a significant worsening in the symptoms of anxiety which I usually manage.

Yes, you heard it right, I am also an anxious woman, which counts as a double scoop on the ice cream cone of irrationality. A study published a couple of weeks ago in the journal Current Biology suggests that the causes of anxiety are very much physiological – literally in the level of your brain’s plasticity – which makes a lot of sense to me.

When I’m struggling with anxiety or depression it’s not that I think anxious or sad thoughts that I could only control better if I wanted to – you know, if I really tried to be ‘rational’. Various metaphors I have used to friends and family in trying to communicate the very physical sensation I feel include: white noise, but as a sensation inside your body, getting louder and louder until there’s no room for other thoughts or sensations, or like trying to hold on to your mental acuity but finding that it slips away like sand pouring through your fingers.

I started as a columnist in January, before the initial nausea that comes in the first few days of anti-depressants had faded away, and I talked about it. I talked about it publicly in the pages of Varsity where any of my tutors, supervisors, friends or people that maybe had only vaguely heard of me because I turned up to a party in their college one time could read it because I wanted to let everyone know that I wasn’t ashamed about it.

More than anything, I wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t ashamed. Each time there is still a twinge of panic that I will be judged, that people won’t be able to see me as a full and ordinary human. This is how stigma works. Not in the taunts or derogatory comments, but in the fear that otherwise decent people are going to view you very differently.

‘Irrational’ is a word often used to dismiss and undermine women. The ideal human, apparently, operates on principles of perfect logic, because emotions are always obstacles and inconveniences. But for me, openly embracing and acknowledging my emotions, my fears and my anxiety in all their tumult is the ideal solution, because I am not a robot but a human.

Staying in touch with my emotions lets me know when there’s something wrong in my life. Although my anxiety gets blown out of proportion sometimes, dealing with it has forced me to fine-tune my diet, my exercise and my self-care, and after a term of figuring out various different ways of helping myself feel better, I no longer feel disabled or inhibited, but empowered.

Julie Holland, an American psychiatrist, warns against over-medicating women’s moods: a method, she suggests, of further shaming their natural, and in fact desirable, responses to the world.

Although I support what she has to say, my experience of medication has not been that it eradicates any part of myself that I find unworthy or problematic. I’ve just been able to accommodate and listen to that part of myself without letting it take over completely.

The thing is, the chronic disparaging of emotions isn’t just an issue for women. Even the phrase ‘repressed emotions’ is basically the hallmark of traditional, toxic masculinity. And it’s not just women who are under the influence of hormones – everyone is, that’s literally why we have them. Neither is anxiety or depression the sole preserve of any gender. Diagnoses for women currently outstrip men, but mood disorders among men are also chronically under-reported.

A society in which emotion is taboo not only misses out on the benefits that emotional intelligence has for our self-awareness and relationships, but it also finds itself unable to deal openly with them when they become difficult. No one is a perfectly rational being, and neither should we strive to be.