Time to Change My Period

by Anonymous

I’m going to talk about the horrors of my period, what I have been through and how over the years I have been able to change it according to how I live on a daily basis.

At first I didn’t have the same dreadful pain that my other friends had. I was really happy to have my period but as the years went on the symptoms started to really kick in. I didn’t get any of those hormonal periods where you shout and groan about the pain. I remember that as the pain got more and more intense there was still a level of enjoyment of it, even though it was strong.

I felt I understood the nature of its process as I began to observe each aspect of my period. (blood clotting, different colours that the blood came out as, I was also interested in the fact that a woman had to lose a lot of blood each month coming out of her own vagina). It helped me give attention to my body and also respect it by looking after it with a pad. I thought I was too young to use a tampon and I remember seeing what it had looked like in a movie called ‘She’s the Man’ where the main character pretends to be a boy and gets caught using a tampon and then sticks it up her nose, I found that quite funny and disgusting at the same time. The characters were playing around with this thing that you stick up yourself, which put me off a bit. It’s quite nasty the things you can do with a tampon.

Before I had started my period we had a class at school about how to use one and the health rules about applying a pad every three or two hours. It was a whole other responsibility to take other than just doing daily tasks like homework or the chores. It felt like a period of growing up.

I remember that I was at a stage where my period started including symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhoea that I had in the summer in year 9 (14 years of age). I started throwing up when I was on my period and this seemed to happen when I was outside away from home. I could not control it, so having been used to going out a lot changed this as I started throwing up on the streets and I didn’t want that to happen anymore. Luckily, I lived quite close to my school so I would leave school and literally throw up on the streets and eventually be sick at home, it was unbearable! I began to just rest at home and that meant a lot of valuable lessons were missed. The long naps that I would have; led onto another day off school and having to eat nothing and just drink water. I felt better when I went to sleep because it numbed the pain for a while but I couldn’t even eat a paracetamol, as I would throw that up too. I recall going once to the doctors who advised me to go on the pill, which I refused to do because I was only 14 at the time. As my period symptoms had become more intense my mother took me to see a healing practitioner Sara Williams who works with Universal Medicine, which is actually quite pro medicine, and I thought they would help me find ways to re-balance my period again.

I thought it was time to somehow change my period and see if there was actually a way to do this. So I began to see Sara and we started asking questions about my period symptoms and why they might have been there in the first place. I was encouraged to look deeper into what my period was truly about. Why did I have those symptoms? Another question was, what was causing them? I then started to FEEL that there was something behind it all and saw that there had to be changes made. I had never even allowed myself to open up to the fact that I had a responsibility to look after myself before.

I remember for the first time, me and my mum were inspired to go and buy dressing gowns and slippers, and my father too actually and I had left a whole day to myself to just rest and have the hot water bottle ready to keep me all warm for a cosy day at home. It felt like heaven, as I had never even considered putting any effort into this time that I called ‘me time’ and I started to really enjoy it.

I was super excited and started seeing that there were more loving choices to make such as going to bed earlier (9.00pm). Teas were becoming a trend for me as I liked the warm nurturing feeling inside my body that they gave me and this was not just any tea, it was fresh herbal tea like peppermint, liquorice, lavender, etc. I told my mother how it felt good that I was doing this, it was like a thank you for letting me have those sessions. I began to feel changes in my body and started to learn how to be with myself even when I was not having a period.

This powerful strength came after having made these awesome choices on a daily basis for a period of 6 months which was not perfect but comparing it to how I had lived before I could feel the HUGE impact it had on my body and when I say impact, I mean my period started clearing up and I no longer had any of those horrible symptoms. This meant I had been able to go to school, still feeling physically weak on my periods but I was able enough to not miss any more lessons. I had reported this to Sara in a session I had and started crying because it felt like I was growing out of old ways and it was truly an absolute miracle. We had no image of how it was going to impact on my period but eventually my period had proven to me that this way of living did work and it did change it.

However, this was not the end of it all as I had gone back to my old ways after this session. I had gone to bed later, I ate bad food and I didn’t give myself the time to rest. I had instead used ‘me time’ to go out with friends which basically meant that I had abandoned myself and had completely missed out on a whole day that was meant for me only. And guess what? All over again I had the pain-fullest of periods and had to deal with missing school, and was forced to rest. It was obvious that my period was not going to let me get away with not taking responsibility for myself over the past month. I felt that if I didn’t want this to happen to me again in my next period that I had a choice to change my decisions into more loving ones. I needed to start taking responsibility and not only do it just because I was on my period but because it was something my body needed and deserved in my everyday life. I knew that it was easy but that it was a full choice that was only mine to make.