.
There were countless evenings, where I was chained to my bed by the gravity of PMDD, and yet… unable to sleep. For many nights, I lay there simultaneously, exhausted, and restless.
Some evenings, the exhaustion won, but on the evenings it didn't I was desperate for a way to quietly pass the time.
Desperate to get out of my head.
With my family sleeping quietly in their bed didn't leave me with a lot of options. Most nights I found myself gloomily strolling through social media but on the nights when wisdom got the better of me, I transmuted that anxious energy and began talking about SeaPaint, simply as a means to pass the time.
Months pass and then a year. The good weeks were few and far between. Thanks to my self sabotage, I spent my good weeks cleaning up all the messes I had made in my bad ones. The depression catches up to me...lingering beyond my cycle, bleeding into the only good days I have left. My hopelessness thickens.
Back then, SeaPaints went by its original name. A larger company claimed it and here we are today… as SeaPaints. That’s a story for a different day though.
Oddly enough, some of my best ideas came from my worst days. So I lay there, once again transmuting my sadness into advertisement. Post after post, share after share. I'm not sure what my reasoning was only that it gave my fingers something to do. As new people joined my little craft group, I set new goals and then chased those too, making these late night spirals my secret weapon of sorts. Of course, all these nights of little sleep would catch up to me eventually, but in the meantime, I was grateful for a coping mechanism.
This was my life, month after month until one day...I realized there were nearly 50,000 people in that once tiny group. Somewhere between my tears of sadness and my silent fits of rage, I built my little business, right from my bed....with a splash of delusion of course because honestly...I never had a clue what I was doing. I was just trying to survive and spreading the SeaPaint gospel if you will, kept me on this planet somehow.
If you don't know what PMDD is, it's a severe condition that turns the week or two before your period into something that can feel unsurvivable. Literally. Suicidal ideation is part of it but along with that comes pain, brain fog, and a plethora of symptoms that make life harder than it was ever intended to be.
So what did I do before SeaPaints existed to cope with PMDD?
Well, over the years, during the day to cope, I painted through it.
On the bad days, the days where getting vertical felt like a personal failure, I focused on painting small things as a distraction. Picture frames. Scraps of wood. Whatever was within reach. I'd layer shade after shade, crying between long dry times....because somewhere between the second and third brush stroke, the pain got quieter. Not gone of course. But noticeably quieter. Less urgent.
On the days I could get out of bed, I tackled dressers.
This ultimately is what turned my coping mechanism into a business. It was the tedious process of other paints, that led to the creation of SeaPaints. Most paints don't care that you have a two hour window before your body gives out.
So I made one that did.
I spent weeks in my kitchen, trying to perfect the vision that I had in my head. I was thoroughly surprised when I tested my concoction. It was better than I imagined. It dried in minutes, covered like nothing I'd ever used, smelled like virtually nothing, and felt like butter under my hands. The first time I used it and realized that it allowed me to base coat, accent, distress, and even seal a piece within hours, was the day I knew I changed a small part of my life, forever.
I didn't know I had invented something however. I thought I had just solved my own problem. It never occurred to me that so many others could relate. PMDD wasn't highly talked about at the time nor was auto immune disease. It didn't occur to me that there was an entire audience needing exactly what I had created.
I never had the balls to market it back then, but somewhere along the way my best friend told me something, that stuck with me. And maybe even changed my brain chemistry ever so slightly.
When I wanted to abandon the idea of selling my invention entirely, she stopped me.
"Jessi! Please! Your paint is a big deal. YOU'RE a big deal. You just don't know it yet."
For whatever reason, I believed her. At least about the paint.
That paint became SeaPaints. The only sea mineral paint in existence.
I get asked a lot, what gave you the idea for SeaPaints. This is the short version.
The one thing this journey has taught me above all else, is that sometimes, the most remarkable things, come from the very depths of despair.
If PMDD is part of your story too
You're not alone in it. I've spent years documenting what I've learned about living with PMDD, from the research nobody hands you to the things that actually help.
START HERE: PMDD Your Guided Library
And if you want to follow along with the messier, more honest version of living with it, The PMDD Chronicles is where I break down the experience relationship by relationship, experience by experience, and how I managed to survive it.
Ready to try SeaPaints?
Doors only open a few times a year. Join the waitlist so you don't miss it.
