Help! Atomic is trying to KILL ME – Part One

This post originally appeared at Gender Dreaming and was updated on January 23, 2024. Part 2 of this essay can be found here: Help! Atomic is trying to KILL ME – Part Two

One of the more frustrating iterations of control freakishness I see amongst pink swayers is when people come to me desperate for help with swaying, yet have this underlying (and sometimes not so underlying) belief that I am out to get them somehow. By “out to get them” I mean they seem to think I am giving them advice that will undermine their sway, am suggesting things that will prevent them from conceiving – possibly forever – or even that I’m trying to harm them or their unborn baby somehow…by focusing on swaying instead of health, by having a cavalier “anything goes” attitude about health and safety, or by failing to do even the most basic level of research into recommendations I make.

These seemingly contradictory belief sets often coexist in the same exact people, making answering their questions a roller coaster ride of vaguely accusatory messages:

Control Freak Mama: atomic, please help me, I will do ANYTHING to have a baby girl!

atomic: ok try this.

CFM: Wait what? You want me to stop taking prenatals and eat less meat? Won’t that hurt my baby?

atomic: Well, of course I’d never suggest anything that could ever a child. Actually prenatals are not necessary till BFP according to the ACOG, and the LE Diet when done properly is 100% in line with World Health Organization recommendations for women in childbearing age, and reproductive endocrinologist guidelines for weight loss prior to conception. “Low Everything” is just the lower range of normal.

CFM: I don’t feel comfortable with that. I would never forgive myself if something happened.

atomic: Ok. Keep taking your prenatal – maybe compromise and take it 3x a week. And if you really can’t do diet, you can go vegetarian instead. How does that sound?

CFM: BUT THAT WILL WRECK MY SWAY!! HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY SUGGEST SOMETHING THAT WILL WRECK MY SWAY? I TOLD YOU I WOULD DO ANYTHING!
atomic:

Odder still, this “atomic is trying to kill me” mindset often comes from a person who is already doing 10,000 actually dangerous things to sway:

Control Freak Mama: I have been taking aspirin, cranberry, olive leaf extract, 10,000 mg Vitamin C, Sudafed, Zyrtec, Benadryl, elderberry for my “immune system”, vitex, saw palmetto, licorice root, peppermint AND spearmint tea, a teaspoon of cinnamon morning noon and night, 17 packets of myoinositol, my dog’s prescription for metformin, my mom’s prescription for letrozole only 5 times as much as normal because I’d love to have twins, 100000000000 mg magnesium and twice as much calcium, I snort a gram of cocaine nightly, and I’m also drinking 400 servings of Crystal Light a day.

atomic: Hmm. That might be dangerous to both you and a future pregnancy. Let’s wean off all that and I want you to be sure you’re taking 1200 mcg folic acid a day.

CFM: OMG you want me to take THAT MUCH? Is that even SAFE?

atomic:

There are also quite a few people who are highly concerned about conceiving in a timely fashion because of (overblown) concerns about age, yet refuse even the most reasonable suggestions to ensure they continue ovulating. Again, many of these people are the same people who seem to think I am literally attempting to murder them or their unborn child:

Control Freak Mama: I really feel I need to conceive immediately because I am 35.

atomic: Well, that’s actually not true for these 900 reasons I’ll now spell out for you, but I always put a premium on fast conception, for these other 900 reasons I’ll also now spell out for you. Long story short, we actually have just the same length of time to BFP with swaying as those who aren’t swaying – 3 months on average. Anyhoo, how’s your diet going?

CFM: I’m eating zero grams fat, 10 grams protein, and 800 cals. I exercise 3 hours a day. My BMI is now 17, my ovulation is coming on CD 35, and my LP is 3 days long.

atomic: What? YIKES!

CFM: Well, I figured I got pregnant eating this way once before, when I was 22 years old. I think, anyway. I wasn’t actually keeping track of my food intake then, to be honest, but I’m just assuming that’s what I ate. It was a boy, so that must mean I need to eat even less now to get a girl, right?

atomic: No! If you’re even correct about what you were eating over a decade ago, your body has no record of what happened way back then. Above all else, you have GOT to stick in the limits. It’s non negotiable, starvation diets are not allowed. If you keep eating that way, you’ll really hurt your chances of getting and staying pregnant. You may even cause yourself or an unborn baby physical harm! Besides, if you lose ovulation, it may take months or even years to fix, and remember how you were wanting to get pregnant quickly?

CFM: BUT THAT WILL WRECK MY SWAY!! HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY SUGGEST SUCH AN UTTERLY INSANE THING?
atomic:

Or this iteration, which I get a fair bit:

Control Freak Mama: I have been on LE Diet for 3 days, and I noticed I am losing huge handfuls of hair in the shower.

atomic: Well, that’s not how hair loss works. It takes months of a highly deprived diet to trigger hair loss, and the LE Diet done properly won’t make your hair fall out anyway. Did you just have a baby within the last year, or come off BCP? Been taking hormonal supplements? Because those things really do make you lose hair.

CFM: Science, schmience, I know it’s the diet, nothing else changed, so I’m going to have my B12 levels checked.

atomic: Ok. Your call. Keep me posted.

CFM: Well, as it turns out, my b12 levels were perfectly fine after all. But my hair is still falling out. The doctor says it’s probably because I had a baby in the last year, but then I told him about this crazy diet I was doing and he told me how absolutely insane it all was, even though it is based on World Health Organization recommendations.

atomic: Well, I disagree with him completely and here is a short novella all about why his claims are incorrect. But it’s your call. Just go vegetarian and do one attempt.

CFM: YOU WANT ME TO GIVE UP DIET? WHY DO YOU WANT MY SWAY TO FAIL?

atomic:

For whatever reason, of late, the percentage of people falling into this “atomic is a murderer, probably; at the very least she wants my sway to fail” category has gone from being a sort of amusing novelty I might encounter from time to time, to being a very large percentage of my pink swayers. I don’t know why, if it’s leftover pandemic stress or a generational shift or some other thing entirely, but it’s really increased to epic proportions, despite our having outstanding results the past several years (shouldn’t good results require less convincing, rather than more?)

And while I certainly don’t mind answering questions, even an endless thread of fairly neurotic questions, lately it’s been kinda demoralizing to find myself in these neverending hedge mazes of control freakishness where you guys argue safety, then switch to having the best sway possible, to getting pregnant fast, to having the best sway possible, back to safety again, and then refusing to accept my guidance on anything at all, even simple facts about the human body, without a knock down, drag out fight:

Control Freak Mama: But I KNOW I had an attempt right on ovulation, because I felt O pains! I’m having a boy I just know it!

atomic: Well, timing doesn’t sway anyway, but the good news is that O pains don’t predict gender, and here is a 5000 word long dissertation on why that is.

CFM: BUT O PAINS

atomic: Even if O pains worked for predicting ovulation 75% of the time, which they absolutely do not, that still doesn’t mean that they’re helpful this time. And timing doesn’t sway anyway!

CFM: I’m doomed!!! DOOOOOMMMMMEEDDD!!!!

atomic:….

CFM: Oh gosh well you’re not going to believe this atomic, but when I thought I was having O pains I was still a week out from ovulation.

atomic: Oh good! That has to be a relief, I know you were upset about that.

CFM: NO, I’m not relieved at all, because I still ended up with one attempt on O Day!

atomic: Ok, how do you know this?

CFM: O Pains.

I kid because I love you guys, and I am one of you, truly. Because I’ve been there, and somehow blundered my way into relative normality from whence I can look back at myself and my thought processes from a decade of distance, I understand how it feels to be plagued by ‘worst first’ thinking that traps us in logical loops where we are perpetually pinballing between extremes instead of seeking the middle ground where we can let our control freak tendencies go and move past them.

Being control freaks, we are highly subject to a burning desire for certainty, so we end up clinging desperately to things that simply cannot be relied upon, like O Pains and tracking our cycles and dark vs. peak opk and assumptions about how many hours it takes sperm to capacitate and how long it can live. From that same desire for certainty, we are highly subject to believe in unproven, ill-defined, all encompassing concepts like “weak ovulation” and “estrogen dominance” and “adrenal exhaustion”. We are forever trying to force all our body’s quirks under these meaningless symptom umbrellas to make sense of them. Because to a control freak, making sense of the unknown allows us to make a plan we believe in, and we love having plans to believe in. We love believing in our plans so much that it doesn’t bother us that much if our big sparkly pink dream castle of swaying is built on shifting sands and the tide is coming in. We just LIKE it when things make sense and we LOVE it when we have a plan based on things making sense, and to be honest we like those things more than we like reality, which tends to be rather messy.

Thus we perpetually find ourselves trying to explain a very general, somewhat random, highly dynamic system (the human body) with a lot of exceptions and variations, and a real whole lot of unknowns, by analyzing it incessantly through a lens of fake certainty, to alleviate our worries about the world. But fake certainty just doesn’t WORK, because it is fake, and things that are fake cannot bring certainty. And when I point that out – that the system is random, dynamic, unknown, varies wildly, and has a lot of exceptions – some of you find that exceedingly irritating. I get it, I do, but I am here in the service of truth, and truth requires that I not play along when people build complicated houses of cards on foundations of pseudoscientific nonsense gleaned from the pages of Maxim Magazine or Acupuncture Today as a stress-relief mechanism.

Part Two of this essay can be found here: https://atomicsagebrush.com/2024/01/23/help-atomic-is-trying-to-kill-me-part-two/

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