I hate my period. It sucks to wake up once a month to discover your best pants are stained and your stomach begins to cramp. I hate that feminists are encouraged to embrace the beauty of a period, the magic of fertility, the true essence of womanhood. To me, it’s not a wonderful experience at all. And I’m sick of feeling the need to ignore that periods are just gross. Who can honestly say they look at their used tampon and feel empowered? I feel disgusted.
Before I started my period, the latest bloomer of all my friends, I couldn’t wait for it to arrive. To have something in common, to bond with the girls around me, to understand what it was like to get a sick note from the dreaded PE swimming lessons. But the day it arrived I immediately despised it. How could I have ever looked forward to this?
I cried actually. Mainly over the fact that I would have to go through this painful, rotten experience of shedding out my organ’s inner linings monthly and the need to wallow in the sadness of being a woman. There’s little sympathy for a person on their period. We’re expected to work through the pain or take pills to control or relieve it, because what other option are we left with? We can’t just halt our day-to-day lives every four weeks, and despite the agony we are enduring, people around us are completely unbothered.
I’m not the first person to feel this way, but to me, period empowerment comes from writing and sharing my most horrifying ‘time of the months’ and my experience of birth control in a humorous way, rather than using period blood itself as some type of activism. I don’t think period art is for me. I want to expose the truth about experiencing a period and all that comes with it. I want to seek out how we can put an end to the pain, fear, mood swings, and mostly the comments and actions from others who will never even experience a period in the first place.
Periods are scary. It’s a constant reminder of fertility. That you can’t control pregnancy. Getting pregnant is a big fear of mine. The thought makes me feel uncomfortable because I have no maternal instinct. This is far from revolutionary (I consider myself a future self-proclaimed spinster), but it becomes scarier in light of the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the US. Women are losing the ability to decide when they want to have a child, in terms of access to abortion and the several barriers to affordable birth control. It’s terrifying.
I imagine the amount of women who are impatiently waiting for their period to arrive because they aren’t ready to have a child, and know no one will help them. We shouldn’t look forward to periods. But what else can we do? How can I go from eagerly waiting for my first period so I wouldn’t fall behind to anxiously waiting as soon as my menstruation app tells me that my period is about to begin? The confirmation of your period arriving doesn’t always indicate that you aren’t pregnant, and many pregnant women still get periods. So my question is, what is the fucking point?
It’s part of the female routine, it’s in your life whether you like it or not. But the monthly agony, mental stress, exhaustion and the hundreds of other symptoms experienced by menstruating people or people on birth control—is it worth it? I’m only twenty one, yet the thought of sterilisation becomes more and more tempting every time I feel that first drop in my underwear. How scary is it that we have to take such drastic measures and change our hormones just to avoid having a child?
My theory is that if we stop trying to glamourise periods, stop taxing the hell out of sanitary towels and tampons, and actually create non-hormonal effective birth control, we could live in a society where I don’t hate having a period. If the side effects made no difference to our physical or mental wellbeing, people that menstruate would be seen as more capable than they have ever been before. Their place in society would change as their period is no longer seen as a ‘weakness’.
I often think about a scene in Fleabag where Kristin-Scott Thomas’s character tells Fleabag that once she reached menopause, she felt she was no longer ‘a machine with parts’. It perfectly describes how men view people who menstruate. We are an object they can control. Our uteruses are an object they want to control. Why else would there be such a big pro-life movement that tries to argue that, if a woman has sex and gets pregnant, she should be ‘punished’ by having the baby whether she wants to or not.
Let me discuss my experience with birth control. In my second semester of university, I was prescribed Rigevidon, which I am still on today. The side effects for Rigevidon are known to be some of the worst, and in some cases the most serious. It’s cheap to prescribe, which is why so many others will likely share some similar experiences. One of the most common side effects is rapid weight gain.
Self-love and body confidence is a whole other story, but freshers-week me, who suddenly grew boobs and saw my petite frame replaced with a woman’s body, was terrified at how different I looked. Weight caught up to me quickly, and as someone who had always been labeled as ‘skinny’ I hated the sudden changes I was seeing. Stretch marks appeared on my thighs, my breasts, my bum, and since they were so new and purple, I spent most of summer 2019 hiding in my tightest-fitting jeans and slathering bio-oil all over myself. It’s sad, right? When you first go on the pill, they are supposed to warn you about the side effects. But they don’t even tell you the whole story.
I went back a few months later for a review, I was told that I’d put on a little bit of weight. Which I was obviously aware of, and felt embarrassed that it was being pointed out. Then the doctor said “when you want something to eat, just have a banana”. This made me furious inside. You put me on hormonal medication and when my body changes you critique my snack choices when you know nothing about me? It shocked me when I got used to going to the doctors alone how unhelpful and invasive they could be about things you cannot control.
When I went back later on in the year, I told the doctor I was struggling with feeling depressed. It all suddenly got worse when I started the pill, so I asked if I could change the pill I was taking. However, instead of reviewing the side effects I was experiencing, I started antidepressants. They luckily worked, but now I am dependent on two medications to take daily just so I can live my life as a woman in my early twenties. Surely there’s better protocol than this? You hear the stories of medications such as Rigevidon doing horrible damage, but here I am three years later, stuck on it. The one good thing from Rigevidon is that it’s safe to not take a break with. So I continue taking them after the three week cycle and I don’t experience a period. Everytime I forget my pill and my period comes, I am faced with disgust and pure pain once again.
I fucking hate my period. I’m so mad. I’m mad that I can’t be mad without drawing attention to myself. That people would make assumptions even if I’m not on my period, I’m just emotional, that I’m bleeding. Maybe we should start fighting back at boys and men saying “time of the month, eh?” by telling them how disgusting the period really is. However, it seems many men already know, which is why they are afraid to talk about them. From what I’ve gathered, men are scared of things they can’t control. The main one is a woman’s body.
Not to get all pro-choice, but the fact that the government in many countries are making decisions that will affect countless people’s lives – pushing them into poverty, mental illness, and literally forcing them to give birth – is insane. What gives them the right to think that the person choosing to terminate a pregnancy’s life is less important than a cluster of cells? What gives them the impression that a child being born against the mother’s wishes will have a good quality of life?
While men can’t control the natural processes of a woman’s body, they do control the support, care, and choices women can make when it comes to their own bodies. Who let men decide such a thing anyway?
The moral of the story is, I hate relying on birth control, but I prefer taking it to having a period every month. I prefer it to the fear I someday won’t be able to choose what I do with my body. I hate my period, but more than that I hate the system we live in, where people who don’t and never will experience menstruation, are left to make the decisions about it.