On my personal journey to relieve my endo pain, I relay some of the negative effects that birth control has had on my body as I call the safety of the pill into question, particularly for individuals like myself who struggle with depression.

At age 25, the last several months have been the first time in my life consistently staying on birth control. In America, this is quite unusual, as many sexually active women turn to the pill earlier on. In the United States, it’s estimated that as much as 98% of sexually active women have at one point used birth control, with the CDC reporting around 62% of reproductive aged women currently using it. The pill ranks as the number one method of birth control in America, with approximately 11 million women on it at any given time. So how can such a commonly used drug make me so alarmingly miserable?

After becoming sexually active, I experimented with birth control pre-college twice, first trying Loestrin and later Lo Loestrin. Both experiences were equally grim, with my body immediately responding with flu-like symptoms, but even worse, hysterical, unmanageable depression that went away immediately upon stopping the pill. With an equally bad experience with the Nuva Ring, I managed to get away this long with the good graces of condoms and blessedly brief menstruation cycles. But then several months ago I began experiencing intense, chronic pain in my lower stomach, which after many trips to doctors and hospitals, was diagnosed as reoccurring ovarian cysts. This led to pain so intense that some days I couldn’t even drink water or sit up, clearly impairing my ability to function. So what’s the treatment option for these unpredictable, unpreventable cysts? Hormonal birth control.

Which brings me to now, several months into Yaz, a birth control recommended for people like myself who deal with depression. And I will report that the endo pain almost entirely evaporated, completely eliminating my period and daily grievances. But this relief comes at a cost, as I feel every part of my body shifting. For one, though the number on the scale stays firmly in place, I feel constantly heavy, leaving my post-eating disorder skin feeling like a relentless cage. My breasts are teeming out of my bra, which might be some women’s dream (or so I’m told), but leaves me uncomfortable and in pain, while I feel different parts of my body suspiciously shifting despite, as I said, the number on the scale not moving up or down.

It’s easy to consider that these changes might be in my head, especially since my past eating disorder has left me hyper-sensitive to even the slightest bodily alterations. But then my research took me to this BBC article, which in fact confirmed that the pill can indeed change your body shape. With the research still weighing in as inconclusive as to whether or not birth control does make you gain weight, it can actually alter your body shape. Studies suggest that women on the pill gain significantly less muscle than those not on it, with hormonal changes striking the division. The pill can also affect fat storage, which may not seem significant since female bodies are in fact biologically engineered for child-bearing, but can still play an arguably critical impact on self-image. For example, as someone who has not yet had a child, the sensation that the pill has been causing of my body no longer being my own leaves me feeling uneasy and unhappy.

Changes in figure, however, haven’t been my largest concerns. My number one fear is mood change, which is why I was prescribed Yaz by my OBGYN, since I was told it is a good birth control alternative for women with depression and anxiety. And yet after starting the pill, I felt the mood shift starting, the steady deterioration of happy, placid thoughts as a gradual mist of emptiness slowly pooled and filled a vacancy in my head. When I called my OBGYN to report my mood shift concerns, the nurse on call told me to wait out the pill for as long as I could (preferably 3 months minimum) and to stop taking it only if the depression reached a critical level, i.e. suicidal ideation. (Yes, really.) Such sound advice aside, I also began to experience other effects, such as persistent gum pain that makes me unable to eat or drink a variety of food and beverage products. A visit to the dentist last week revealed a very clean mouth and some quite swollen gums, courtesy of none other than hormones, as my dentist told me painful, swollen gums are a very common condition in pregnant women due to hormone changes.

So there we have it. On my quest to relieve my endo pain, I am left with a foreign-feeling, fluctuating body, chronic sore gums, and a noticeably altered mood. And my negative reports are certainly not the only of the variety, nor are they the worst, as there are thousands of women out there who can point to birth control as devastating relationships, mental health, and physical well-being, in extreme cases causing suicidal feelings that nearly ruined lives. And the disturbing part is, you don’t have to put on a tinfoil hat and deep-dive the internet to hear horror stories of the pill. You merely have to type the words “birth control effects” into Google to be inundated with a host of real life horror stories that will really leave you questioning the little round tablet you take once a day.

Time reports that studies have indeed found that hormonal birth control is linked to a higher risk of suicide, leading to stories of birth control nearly ending lives, such as this one reported by Vice. In just five months on hormonal birth control, one young woman had to call a distress center in order to keep herself from taking her own life. Birth control bludgeoned her well-being, killing her productivity, creativity, and mood balance, culminating in depression and mental health problems that lead to suicidal thoughts. The cause of her desire to suddenly take her own life? You guessed it: her hormonal birth control.

Genetic makeup, hormone composition, brain chemicals… all of these factors that determine who we are as people, how we feel and respond to our environments, stressors, and stimuli all strike me as shockingly delicate. As someone who was given the wrong antidepressant for my body at one point, I can report firsthand that the effects of the wrong mind-altering drug can be monumental, disturbing, and life-altering. It’s virtually impossible to maintain yourself when there are substances in your veins literally pumping you into feeling like another person. But then that broaches another question that is all but impossible to answer, who are we really? Are we the person we are without any chemical alterations, or the person we become once chemical imbalances are realigned?

As someone who has used Zoloft for nearly the entirely of my adult life, I am deeply appreciative of the fully functioning adult (and not achingly depressed imitation girl) that I am able to be on it. But is it merely disguising my “true” state, or enhancing the cards I was dealt by correcting my brain chemical imbalance? These questions are relevant on my journey to discovering how to relieve my endo pain, because one of my biggest fears when tampering with hormones is how they will toy with my mood, since I do feel like a mentally more uplifted person without the pill. Perhaps there is a “perfect” hormone balance for my body that I simply need to strike through continued birth control experimentation, but the question will always linger in the back of my mind would I be feeling this way if not for my medication?

In closing, with the majority of reproductive aged women in the United States being on birth control, it seems that it’s working for many individuals. But that doesn’t mean that the increasingly worrisome side effects of the pill should be ignored. Though I would verbally spar with anyone who dares to suggest a misogynistic gripe such as we can’t have a female president, because her period would interfere with her decision making, I will admit that (for women and men), hormonal changes do play a significant role in who we are and how we feel. That’s why it can be dangerous to invite birth control into your life, even though it might be a pragmatic necessity.