If there’s one thing I want to break as a woman and psychotherapist, it would be the shackles of the sick productivity culture that has been subtly poisoning our precious moments. As I claim my period days as the days of disappearing from the world and putting down tasks, while feeling absolutely no shame in lying still on my bed, in broad daylight. As many hours as I need, as many days it may take, practice tells me that I come out with much more life force than struggling away my bloody time would give.
It’s not my mother’s fault, but… hiding away the monthly pain seems cultural – and what a lie! Like a magician’s trick, a menstruating girl would vanish to her inner sanctum, her aid wrapped and smuggled in black plastic. What a tragedy! But morbidly funny to look at the magnanimity of the trick – does it really fool the men? Oh no, it’s rather about the discomfort that gazes – though for what reason, that eludes me. How can something so natural be treated as an annoyance? Take a pain killer? And go back to work? So much of proving to the world left to do?! Tick tock, time does not wait for anyone?! Do you want to break the glass ceiling or not??
Here’s a personal peeve coming out – unfortunately, the pads don’t take the pain away, the ‘fragrance’ always smells weird, and despite how many models spritz around the town painting them red, as per the ads, the white attire is definitely cringeworthy. Please don’t sell freedom to me.. it comes naturally to us when we start listening to our bodies.
“The problem is that women can’t be trusted to tell the truth, manipulative they can be, don’t you think?” To tell the truth, period always brings back shameful memories of embarassing Others, being a burden for bleeding freely through those life saving pads, showing evidence in pants, skirts, dresses, salwar kameez, shorts, bedsheets, sofas, quilts… The shocked, angry and tired look of mother, for yet another task added in the long list of to-do. The actual problem is, I have never seen my mother take rest when she would be bleeding – no change in her routine to tell me that something major is happening to her physiologically – a time of life-death-life cycle. Father would be helpful of course if he’d be intimated of a rather painful cycle.
I always took rest because the pain was too much, and the gynaes not so helpful. I let every family member know exactly how much I was going through, my style of education – screaming it to make it obvious. I screamed some more in places of work, my personal revolution – till the last standing enemy was faced – Me.
Needless to say, I had a love-hate relationship going on with my bleeding – it would cause too much pain. But the pain also served a function. To let anyone in the vicinity know that it is in their best interest to let me be. You see, it still wasn’t a time of acceptance. Then the pain slowly made me its student – to pace my breathing with the pain until it gave way to silence, to listen intently to my body, to let go of all my worldly anxieties so that I could tend to myself. To feel close to God, to scratch the deep end of psyche where logic ends and synchronicities begin to tell a truth – a truth that I can claim as long as I give due credit to the long line of ancestors gone through the same.
La Loba, how you nourish my soul, feed me stories that still stand the test of time, only so that I can go back to the world, fully replenished, and my cup brimming with the nectar of love and wisdom for my fellow humans.
This is my way of ending intergenerational trauma. Let this be the one thing that stops so firmly with me, that there is no trace of this sickness in the next generations to come.