PHOTO CREDIT: UNTABOOED
"PERSISTENCE IS THE ONE THING THAT'S KEPT ME GOING THROUGH EVERYTHING IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. IF IT'S SOMETHING YOU REALLY BELIEVE IN, IT'S JUST ABOUT BEING MASSIVELY PERSISTENT. YOU REALLY HAVE TO BE, BECAUSE NOBODY IS GOING TO LISTEN THE FIRST TIME."
Holly Grigg-Spall is the author of Sweetening the Pill, a book detailing the dangerous and often underplayed emotional and psychological side-effects of hormonal birth control. She is also responsible for the upcoming documentary film based off the book, currently in works with Executive Producer Ricki Lake and Director Abby Epstein. Holly’s work is committed to helping women make safe, informed choices about their birth control and raising awareness on this important issue.
I came across Holly at a THINX event in LA where she was featured on the panel. Hearing Holly talk about her personal story on the Pill resonated with me on a deep level as I had always suspected hormonal birth control to be more dangerous than advertised and had experienced many of the same symptoms myself while on it years ago. I wanted to talk to Holly more about her work and how she got to be where she is today because I knew her story would resonate with many others as well.
Holly’s career is an example of an unplanned path, one that finds you and what you decide to do with it when it does. It’s about turning the bad into the good and using that experience to help others; a powerful reminder of our ability to be the change in both life and career. I hope her words not only inform you, but also inspire and empower you as well!
I came across Holly at a THINX event in LA where she was featured on the panel. Hearing Holly talk about her personal story on the Pill resonated with me on a deep level as I had always suspected hormonal birth control to be more dangerous than advertised and had experienced many of the same symptoms myself while on it years ago. I wanted to talk to Holly more about her work and how she got to be where she is today because I knew her story would resonate with many others as well.
Holly’s career is an example of an unplanned path, one that finds you and what you decide to do with it when it does. It’s about turning the bad into the good and using that experience to help others; a powerful reminder of our ability to be the change in both life and career. I hope her words not only inform you, but also inspire and empower you as well!
- Much of your book Sweetening the Pill discusses the dissociation that occurs when we give up control of our bodies to medicated hormonal regulation through the pill – we become out of tune and out of touch with not only our physical selves but also our emotional selves. What can you tell women about how taking back control of this aspect of our lives relates to a much bigger picture of self-empowerment?
Well, what my focus has always been on and what I write about in the book is the emotional and psychological side effects of the Pill, which can mean a variety of things – things like depression (listed in the insert of most pill packs), anxiety, panic disorder, and paranoia, which all come under the banner of sub-clinical depression. And when you’re in that situation, you often have really low self-esteem as well, which affects your decisions and your actions – there’s this general kind of feeling of being very unsure of yourself and feeling unstable. Different studies have suggested that it’s a subset of women who have extreme emotional changes, but it’s up to half of women who have clinical depression symptoms. When you think about the fact that 80% of women have at some point used the Pill, those are some pretty serious side effects to take into account.
All of that was part of my own experience on the Pill, and why I eventually came to write the book. I figured out that my symptoms were related to the Pill because of an online forum I found called “Yaz and Yasmin Survivors.” At that time it was a forum where people could share their stories about the negative side-effects they experienced while on those particular birth control pills, and I found that they were all eerily similar to my own. I was on Yasmin at the time and it made me want to look further into what was going on.
As I researched more, I saw that all of these side effects that women were reporting were being viewed by the medical community as unrelated mental health issues, and therefore being treated with different medications. There was no consideration given to the notion that the cause of those symptoms might be from a prescribed medication in the first place. That really disturbed me. Women were experiencing these things but nobody was diagnosing it, nobody was acknowledging it, and often they were being told outright that even if their symptoms were real and valid, they couldn’t be from the Pill.
The other thing that many women were reporting was this kind of blah feeling, this kind of “I don’t care,” or “I’m not interested” attitude. As I looked further into this I saw that this was often a symptom of low testosterone. When I looked back at the Pill and into exactly what kind of “hormonal regulation” was involved, I found that suppressed testosterone was a main component. So that was really shocking to me, because testosterone isn’t just about about sex drive – which is what most people think. It’s also related to ambition, creativity, and really your drive for all things. And you can’t just switch off one hormone and think it’s going to only effect one thing, it’s part of a much wider action in your body with much wider side effects.
If you think about that, and you think about the fact that 80% of women who were born after 1945 have taken the Pill at some point in their lives, you can really see the possibility of how that could have affected their quality of life. You think about how that could have affected their work, their relationships, their ability to do things they want to do, their decisions … there’s a lot of different aspects to consider.
So in terms of self-empowerment, that’s really a pretty dis-empowering situation. Self-empowerment is about being in control of your own body, your own actions, your own decisions. So for me, my choice to go off the Pill was an act of self-empowerment. When I came off the Pill I no longer felt out of control. I had a full range of emotions that of course went up and down, but I didn’t feel like they were overwhelming me the way they had before. And that was really helpful of course in terms of just feeling more confident, self-assured and stable.
It’s really about what good mental health can do for women. I say this in the book and it seems quite hyperbolic but I think it’s true – we always talk about what women have been able to do with the Pill as a form of support and empowerment, but we don’t talk about what some women can do when they’re not on the Pill. About the type of self-empowerment that can come from being able to think more clearly, be more creative … to not have panic attacks, to not be depressed, to be more socially confident, to feel better in your relationships.
- Prior to writing this book, your career in journalism was focused mainly in film and culture. Can you talk a bit more about your personal story and how your career evolved into the place it’s at today?
Yes, I was a film journalist for a while and I really enjoyed my work, it was something I had been interested in since before college. It was going really well, but then the recession hit and our company got bought by another company and slowly over the course of the next year everyone lost their job. It was also around that point that I found the Yaz forum online and began to make the connection between the psychological symptoms I was experiencing and the Pill.
At that time my husband was living with me in London and we weren’t married yet. I knew the recession wasn’t going to get any better, so we chose to take that time as an opportunity to leave the UK and go back to the US to get married. When we got to the US, I had to wait for my work visa to be approved before I could start working, so I had a period of about six months where I didn’t have a job to go to everyday.
Up to that point, I had only written one article about the Pill called, ‘What You Should Know About the Pill’ for Easy Living Magazine. It was only a two-page article, but I had done masses of research on the subject in preparation – it was the first time I had ever written about women’s health topics and it was a pretty big magazine. So I started thinking about all that research I had done and what I could do with it. I figured since I had the time, I would create a blog. Initially it was really just about having a place to put all that research so that I felt like all the work I had done had a purpose. I thought, “Okay, I’ll do this blog and see what happens!”
I started the blog and I really enjoyed working on it, but within about three or four weeks I realized that even though I was writing about all the harmful effects of Yasmin, I was still taking the Pill. I was taking a different brand called Femodene, but I was still taking the Pill. I realized I didn’t feel comfortable taking the Pill at all anymore and so I finally stopped. And then the blog ended up becoming my story of coming off the Pill.
The more I wrote, the more ambitious I became about it. People would write to me and tell me how similar their own stories were, and thank me for writing about it. I started to think that this could be a new focus for me, that I could also write other pieces on this topic. So I started pitching to various publications and began getting more of my articles published. I ended up having a couple interviews in The Washington Post, and I did a few other pieces here and there that were for feminist blogs and different things. So I really started building up a catalogue of articles on the subject.
It was during my time as a guest-blogger at Bitch Magazine that I started to receive a lot of really negative feedback. I found that people were angry about my perspective not just on the Pill, but also on periods and women’s fertility in general. It was hard to hear, but it was also what made me realize that I had a unique perspective on things that was different from most viewpoints on the Pill, and that this was necessary information to get out there. It’s really what propelled me forward and ended up becoming the paving ground for what my book proposal would be.
It was around that point that I thought, “Okay, if people want to print articles about this and readers are so passionate about the subject, then there might be interest for a book there.” So then I quickly wrote a book proposal. And to be honest, I submitted it almost 200 times. I always find it hilarious when people go, “Oh I’ve had like 15 rejection letters.” I’m like 15? That’s it? I was doing this for years! I just kept submitting it, and in the meantime continued to work on the blog and other things to pay the bills.
It ended up taking me about two or three years from actually writing the book proposal to getting a contract to getting it published. During that period, I also took some time off from shopping it around. I was working really hard to establish my life in LA so I took some time off to do that and then I returned to sending it out again. Once I finally did get a contract it was with a small independent publisher who couldn’t afford to pay me an advance, so I wrote it in about 6 months as I couldn’t afford to take more time than that off and work part-time in my day job.
- The book is now being produced as a documentary film by Ricki Lake, how did things evolve into that direction?
Well, just before it got published, I decided I was going to try to turn the book into a documentary so it could reach an even wider audience. I had been impressed by a film Ricki Lake produced called The Business of Being Born and had mentioned it in my book, so I decided to reach out to the director of the film, Abby Epstein, and tell her my plans to see if she wanted to be involved. I sent her a copy of my book and we emailed back and forth quite a bit. She was really open to everything, but she was also really busy at that point and didn’t have a lot of time to look into it.
So in the meantime, I set about getting a crew together here in LA to get started on the documentary myself. I gathered together with a few women and we began working on the project. We had no money and limited experience and to be honest, it wasn’t going that great. I was about 6 months into it all and feeling quite stressed out and worried when all of a sudden I got a call from Abby. She was like, “I’m coming to LA, do you want to meet up and show me what footage you’ve got from this documentary you’re making?”
So I’m like, “Yeah, sure okay!” but secretly freaking out because I knew I didn’t have much to show. When I went back to my crew things kind of imploded, the woman I was working with didn’t want me to pitch with Abby and the footage we had was limited. I had a horribly stressful four days of trying to pull things together before I just decided to call Abby up and tell her the truth about what was going on. I ended up calling her and just being like, “Look, I haven’t got any footage to show you right now so I’m not going to be able to do that kind of meeting. Can we just meet up for coffee and talk?” So then she said, “Well okay, why don’t you come to Ricki’s house tomorrow morning?”
So I went, I went to Ricki Lake’s house and I literally sat on the kitchen counter and pitched to them for two and a half hours. They asked me what I had done so far and what I thought I was capable of doing and I told them about my progress and vision and the type of response and interest I had received about the Pill up to that point. And at the end of it all they were like, “Okay, yeah this is great, we’re going to do this!” From there they optioned the book – which means they bought the rights to the book – and signed on as Director and Executive Producer of the film as their project. My title with the film is Consulting Producer/Writer, but it’s their project. So that’s how it all happened.
- For women who are looking at this from a logistical perspective, how did you earn a living during that time? Were you making money off the book?
No, not at all. It wasn’t until the last year really that I would say that my whole life is now this and that all the work I do and the income I earn comes from that, so it’s a pretty recent development. After my book came out great stuff happened – like getting interviewed for Elle and Vogue Magazine – but it wasn’t necessarily the kind of things that translated into me being able to pay my rent.
I continued working full time at my job in the news industry, which had nothing to do with women’s health whatsoever. I was working for a media agency that sold stories to tabloid newspapers, and I was the person who was in charge of finding “weird and wonderful stories” that would be on the front page of publications like the National Enquirer and things like that. So that’s what I was doing when I took those three hours to go pitch at Ricki Lake’s house. I certainly wasn’t fully committed to women’s health in the way that I am now, at that point.
When that job came to an end, I actually had a really hard time finding work. You’d think having a book published would give you an advantage, but in my case it became almost a hindrance. It was a pretty controversial book, and a lot of people didn’t like it. It almost discredited my capabilities as a writer. You can google my name and find some really, really terrible reviews of the book. And so you know when you’re looking for a job, often the first thing employers do is google your name.
So that was really tough, but in the end it made me realize, “Okay, well I need to be working with people who understand what I’m doing and appreciate my work, not those who don’t.” I had to think about what transferable skills I had to offer and what kind of people I could work with in those areas. I took into account my skills as a writer and how I did all the marketing for the book myself. I decided I could help people on a freelance basis to do things like market their book, and could also work within the women’s health sphere because of the people that understood me there and thought I was doing a good thing.
So that lead me into the work I do now with Daysy which is still my primary source of income. Daysy is a female-led company that sells safe, alternative birth control in the form of fertility monitors that track ovulation by recording your basel body temperature. My role at Daysy combined with my freelance work allow me to be involved with both writing and marketing, as well as social media consultation, events organization, and various other things – but they’re all tied into women’s health and come out of my experience with the book and the film.
These roles are really what allow me to continue doing my work with Sweetening the Pill. And I’m grateful for that, because otherwise I probably would have had to take a full time job doing something totally unrelated, and then I wouldn’t have had the time and energy to dedicate to doing things like promoting the book and working on the documentary. If it weren’t for the fact that I ended up working in this field where everybody I work for and with is so supportive of what I’m doing, those things just wouldn’t be plausible.
- From your experience, what can you tell other women about the benefits of aligning your passion with a purpose versus just pursuing passion alone?
I loved my job in film journalism. I love film, I still do, it’s a big part of the reason I live in LA. But at the same time, the only real impact I felt I had with that job was if I championed an independent movie that nobody was going to see unless they read a really good review of it, then I felt good. When I did that I felt like I was helping people and making a difference.
I think the major change now is knowing that I’ve made a direct impact on people’s lives in a much deeper way. When somebody says to me, “Thank God I found your website,” or “Thank God I found your book, I’ve been in a really bad place but now I feel so much better,” or “Your book is life-changing,” you know those are the kind of things that are really wonderful and are what make you feel like, oh okay – I’m doing okay at life! It makes you feel like all that work, all the time and effort, is worth it.
Also we made a short film for The Guardian when we did the Kickstarter campaign for the documentary, where we talked more in-depth about the very serious life-threatening side effects of hormonal contraceptives. I know that many women watched that and that it was a big part of spreading awareness of the very real dangers of the Pill that are often not discussed. So having that kind of purpose to my work is very meaningful, you know it’s absolutely important.
- For fellow women who are looking to combine their passions with a purpose, what would you tell them about how to plan this type of career path? Is it even something you can plan?
Well, from my own experience I never thought that this work with the Pill would end up being my life, it really just became my life without me even realizing it. I think it’s just about trying a lot of different things and seeing where that takes you. There’s no real “formula” to follow, you don’t have to do things in a particular order. For instance, when I wrote my book I didn’t have a formula to base it off of. It wasn’t something that had been talked about before, so it really brought me into this whole new world of women’s health and nutrition and medicine, and one thing just kept leading to another.
And also you know you really just have to keep going and be persistent with your vision. Persistence is the one thing that’s kept me going through everything in my entire life. If it’s something you really believe in, it’s just about being massively persistent. You really have to be, nobody is going to listen the first time. It’s about not letting those 200 rejection letters get you down or cause you to give up. It doesn’t just happen, you have to push for it.
And another thing that I think is important for people to realize is that it’s a continuous journey, there’s really no state of “arriving.” Somebody I know who’s an author said something to me recently that I found very interesting, he said you know when you’re doing something like this and you find yourself in conversations with people who really look up to you and admire you, they tend to think you’ve got it all together. They’re like, “Oh my God, you’ve got a book published and you’re working with Ricki Lake – what a dream come true!” And it’s like of course it’s a dream come true, but it’s still a lot of hard work. It’s funny when you’re in those situations because it’s like okay, is it my obligation now to make people think that I really do have it all together and that it really is the absolute best, or is it my job to be realistic and open about those situations?
Because in truth it’s hard. Just because you write a book doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to make a lot of money off of it, or that you’ll be in the New York Times. I never want to put people off, but at the same time I want to be realistic about what it takes and what it’s really like once you’ve “made it.” Even from the point of how amazing it is to get a book published, at the same time you are excited about that, you still have to wake up and deal with the next day, and the next day, and where you go from there. You don’t just sit around constantly going “I got a book published!” It’s a process and that’s the important thing to understand, there’s always going to be something else that you’re working towards.
- As someone who has faced a significant amount of backlash for her work, how do you stay strong amidst criticism that can be extremely hurtful? What advice can you offer to other women for how to handle adversity that comes up?
I think the most hurtful thing about the criticism is how it affected the way some people viewed me. Not just the trouble I faced when looking for a job, but also the way people judged my character because of that. You know, I wrote a book in which I admitted that I had mental health issues as a result of the Pill, and a lot of people saw that and said, “No, she’s probably just got mental health issues.”
So that definitely wasn’t easy on me at first, but it was a good thing in the end because I came to see that all that anger meant that what I was talking about was an important issue and something that needed to be said. A lot of that negativity is what propelled me forward, because I realized I had a perspective that was unique and that wasn’t being discussed, and that was necessary to add to the conversation about the Pill. So I think it’s about turning that criticism into fuel or something that can work as a positive for you.
- What kind of fears or obstacles have you had to face along this career path and what have you learned from them?
One of my biggest fears is public speaking, and it’s really only recently that I’ve become relatively confident with it. For a long time I avoided doing it at all. You know, most authors when they release a book do a tour and go out and talk about it, but because I really didn’t like the idea of public speaking I just didn’t do it. However, I’m proud to say I finally did a book launch a couple months ago – two years after my book came out!
Once I did that and started to do more public speaking on the topic, I saw how necessary it was. So many women would come up to me after and ask me questions, so many women were looking for help and resources. It makes you feel like, oh okay, even if this is uncomfortable this is definitely necessary and what I need to do. Also what helps me calm my fear is to just speak authentically. It seems like a cheesy thing to say, but I just try to be authentic and normal, and I try to be humorous about it – I don’t try to be super dogmatic or anything.
A big obstacle I had to face on this path was trying to get my book published – as I mentioned before, I received close to 200 rejection letters! And the few publishers that were interested would have their agents write back to me and say things like, “Well it’s really great, but it really needs to be about your story,” or “It really should just be personal,” or “I really don’t know if you should be talking about all that science in there,” – all those different kinds of things.
What really helped me through that time though was a conversation I had with a pretty big-time agent in New York who actually really liked the idea. He was like, this is great, I want to take you on, but then he talked to the rest of his team at the agency about it and they were like, no, this isn’t going to sell enough, and he was like sorry, I can’t go forward with it, but I think this is a really brilliant idea and you have to do it, this is a good thing to do. So that really gave me confidence because he was from a big publishing house and he saw something in it, especially as somebody who didn’t have a personal relationship with the topic, and so that really pushed me along.
- What can you tell women about your experience with building a strong network of supportive women around you and why it’s so important that we help each other?
I think it’s hugely important to be collaborative in work like this. It’s important to not have a particularly big ego about anything – I’m happy to champion other people’s work, I’m happy to talk about other people’s books, I’m happy to go and tell people to talk to somebody else, or point them towards a website or article or discuss somebody else’s project. And I think that’s what makes me successful. Probably half of what I’ve done in the last 10 years is all about making connections with people, and how if you make connections with people and you’re good to them and you help them, then they’re going to help you too.
I think not being collaborative is one of the biggest mistakes people make in business. When people build business or create projects and are like, “I own this,” and they try to cut everyone else out and say it’s solely theirs, they’re really doing themselves a disservice. Because that’s so rarely true. Usually there are people who came before you, people who were doing something similar, people you asked for advice along the way, and people who are doing things a bit like what you are doing but in a different way from you, and you need to acknowledge that and support that and collaborate with those people instead of trying to separate yourself from them.
It’s so important to support one another, because in reality your success is everyone’s success. Whenever given the opportunity, you should always look around and say, “Okay, who else’s work can I elevate at this point?” or “Who else can I talk about?” Because that helps, it really helps. It helps more than people think. I think a lot of people think, “If I do really well, then everybody else is my field is automatically going to rise up with me.” But it’s like well, not really, you kind of have to talk about them and direct people to them, you can’t just talk about yourself.
Your contemporaries and also the people that came before you are a big proponent to your success – everybody has different levels of knowledge so it’s important to connect and collaborate with them and support them as well. Also, you’re all working for the same cause. Especially when it’s something like what I’m doing with women’s health, where we’re trying to help people, there’s really no room for ego or separation. We’re trying to help people make massively important reproductive decisions, so there’s no room for being like, “Well my opinion is the only opinion.” You have to support one another; we are all working towards the same goal of improving women’s health.
- In your book you talk about how the phrase “Be the change you wish to see in the world” came to take on a very specific meaning for you in relation to your experience with the Pill. Can you elaborate on this for readers?
My interpretation of “Be the change” in that sense refers to the change of coming off the Pill and coming back into my natural body rhythm. When you’re on the Pill, your body is in a kind of unchanging stasis, in that you’re on the same level of synthetic hormones the whole time. So when I finally came off the Pill, I experienced a significant change. That difference in my hormones really changed how I felt and thought and acted from week to week – all of it in positive ways for me, because I felt like I was coming back to myself. And so in that sense for me, it was really about embodying that change – about experiencing the change of emotion that happens when you’re no longer suppressing your normal hormonal fluctuation with synthetic hormones.
That’s kind of what I see as the change that starts all the other change. It’s about what good mental health can do for you, how a clearer mind and increased creativity can give you the fuel to do all kinds of things – to change the world, to change yourself, to change your situation. And it’s also about how those changes can change others. In my case, my story of going off the Pill after a decade ended up influencing other people to come off the Pill after decades. That change that I made in my life ended up being a change that other people made in their lives.
Also I wrote the book because I wanted to help other women, I wanted them to avoid the kind of suffering that I went through. So after it came out, I kept going back to my cause and thinking about how I could get this information out to more women, which turned into the documentary. So all of that comes back to me saying, “Okay, I have to kind of ‘Be the change’ – I have to make the change happen, and the change isn’t going to happen unless more people hear about it and hear about this independently published book as a resource. So that was another whole part of it.
- This site is intended to be a source of inspiration for women, by sharing stories like yours I hope to show other women what’s possible. From your experience, what can you tell readers about the importance of having role models or people that inspire you in your life?
I don’t know if I would necessarily use the word role models, but I think it’s definitely important to have people in your life that you can learn from and be inspired by. A lot of my book talks about other people’s work and acknowledges those “role models” of mine. I absolutely recommend reaching out and talking to the people you respect and admire. That’s how you learn more, that’s how you gain fresh perspectives. It also inspires you and fuels you, and you often end up inspiring each other.
A lot of times I’ll go up to someone I admire and tell them how much I love their work and then come to find they’re a fan of my book, so it really becomes a mutual thing. And then from there we can often come up with ways to help each other and work together. I think what it comes down to in the end, is that it’s really just about helping people and them helping you, kind of this mutual thing. I never use the term mentors or anything like that, I really consider it more of just making friends.
HOW YOU CAN HELP: PURCHASE HOLLY'S BOOK HERE. TELL YOUR FRIENDS! STAY EMPOWERED: CHECK OUT SAFE, HORMONE-FREE BIRTH CONTROL ALTERNATIVES HERE. STAY INSPIRED: CHECK OUT HOLLY'S WEBSITE HERE FOR MORE INFO ON ALL THINGS SWEETENING THE PILL RELATED. LIKE SWEETENING THE PILL ON FACEBOOK AND FOLLOW HOLLY ON TWITTER.