Think about your school days, and you’d be groaning at the idea of all those first periods- barely awake, who wants to be learning HISTORY? The only difference between this and a female’s first rendezvous with ‘shark week’ is that it’s HER-story. Mine was no exception, the twelve-year-old me was petrified to find blood during that early morning bath. But I was lucky to have my mother who sat down a hysterical me, and managed to convince me that I wasn’t dying. So here’s the deal- I grew up when internet was still somewhat a luxury, it’s usage was limited, sex education was a subject we had never heard of, and Netflix hadn’t dropped its bomb series with the same name yet. All we had was the women around us. While my mother did a great job at comforting me, and explaining to me what was happening to me, and why, I was later instructed not to discuss the matter with my brother, and never to bring it up in front of my guy friends.
But here’s the thing- no amount of coaxing and comforting changed this feeling of impending doom that I was feeling. It felt like gravity was working overtime just to churn on my insides. I had cramps, but suddenly I felt mentally exhausted, not to mention- almost disgusted- whether at myself or what had happened to me that morning, I didn’t know, I still don’t. But I presume it stemmed from the fact that this ‘shark week’ was something no one had ever talked to me about, it could only have been something awful! Because those are the kind of things we don’t talk about, the twelve-year-old me thought.
Girls running, sun shining, faces beaming with joy- this is what most commercials for sanitary pads seem to be about. At times they’re so ambiguous, under the pretext of being ‘subtle’ that young people might not even know what is being advertised. Starting conversations about periods is important because treating it as a taboo makes it seem like a horrible sickness with no riddance to avail. There’s a lot in this world that we need to take strain for, let’s not let mere stains be what our women live in fear of.
