Everyone has a weird period story. I don't think that anyone had this fairy tale entrance into womanhood.
When I first got my period, it was anything but magical, and something I was actually really embarrassed to talk about. At like 11 it was downright traumatizing to get my period, and for me, it wasn't something that I was anticipating or looking forward to. During my adolescence, I was still trying to navigate having a crush on a boy, and I had to juggle my mother scaring me out of using tampons until I was in high school on top of it all.
So that's a little dramatic, but for me and my friends, (as I begin to throw everyone I know under the bus) when we all started to get our periods, it was something that we were just uncomfortable with. For the majority of us, we were still pretty uncomfortable in our own skin.
In fact, I think that the first time I actually felt comfortable embracing my period was when I saw the Kardashians talking about Kotex on Youtube and that's when I embarked on using Kotex forever. But really, that was the only time that I felt like having a period was normal --even though my friends were starting theirs, and my mom had obviously had hers.
It was a bashful stigma that I think, in my own life experience, was set up during a vague and very blanketed sex-ed conversation in school, which then my mom had added to in our own central conversation about my fun adventure through puberty.
Nevertheless, the conversation seemed to always stagger towards something that was blush-worthy and embarrassing. And most importantly, no one ever told me that what my body was doing was normal, healthy, and practical. In other words, it meant that my body was working the way in should be, and that is a little victory on my part, not a shameful one.
If you are also a proud owner of a vagina, then you know that "I'm-trying-to-be-discreet-but-I'm-in-pain-and-I'm-also-bleeding-everywhere" feeling. It's like limbo but worse because no one else notices it. I guess that I can say, I'm very proud that I have a healthy working body and can have a menstrual cycle.
I'm not saying that having a period is all rainbows and roses and that it should be portrayed as such, I'm just saying that if we had a book like Everybody Poops for those who are biologically chained to bleeding once a month then we wouldn't have to tiptoe around a lot of issues.
Since when did something that's a healthy and normal thing become such a big deal for us to talk about? I won't lie, even now for me, I can't believe that I'm sharing my period with strangers on the internet! And for that, I think we just need to normalize the topic more. I feel like, with the more liberal side of the internet, it's easier to discuss, and it's easier to talk about with others, but that's with a screen in front of you. But we need to talk about this more face to face.
Yeah, we're doing a lot better with the culture we live in, but in some parts of the world, menstruation is still seen as dirty.
And specifically in our part of the world, it is seen as something that big companies can make money off of. And even though that's a whole other rabbit hole to go down, I don't think that I was irked about the latter until I started looking at the price tags for protection that I had to buy. Then I got mad. It's off-putting to think that a society that turns their nose up to the topic, is so hell-bent on profiting from it.
As a general note, the menstrual cycle is still seen as totally taboo and collectively, those who have a period are suffering for it. Collectively, as Radhika Jhaveri put in her own article on the menstrual taboo, "Menstruation is used, with tremendous success, as a tool to make women feel inferior about themselves and their bodies."
Though this had to do with the social practices in India, I still believe that this applies to Western views in values in my own experience as a woman --and an experience for many other women internationally as well.
In all, this is about changing the rhetoric and perspective we have on the "embarrassing" and "taboo" things that happen to our bodies. I think that this has to do with addressing the elephant in the room that, well, isn't actually an elephant in the room. And in this case, the big red elephant isn't dirty, and it isn't bad.
It's a symbol of a working body, and sometimes it tells you a lot more about your own health than you think.
