good afternoon folks so i'm really pissed off and my family is tired of my feminist bullshit so guess who gets to hear about it!!! you! my 26 followers! isn't that grand?

Why We Need To Talk About Menstruation: A Thread

so i'm going to start off by saying that to my knowledge, i am completely neurotypical. i haven't been diagnosed with depression/anxiety/adhd/you name it which doesn't mean i don't have anything but it does mean that if i do, it doesn't significantly impact my life

this is important because i am coming at this from a privileged position and i can't imagine how much worse it would be if i had a mental illness, so please read this thread as coming from the perspective of a white, middle class, abled cis woman and it's STILL awful so

anyway. on to my main point: periods have so much fucking stigma attached to them. no one talks about them. i've had my menstrual cycle for exactly nine years now and i have never once seen it dealt with in the media except as a joke.

just about everyone with a uterus experiences the discomfort, shame, inconvenience, and often agony of having a period and the most we ever hear about it is "hurr durr the only reason this female must be angry at me, a misogynist asshole, is because she's on her period amiright"

it's fucking disgusting and it's actually harmful to people like me who never got comprehensive sex ed and had to figure out a lot of this shit on their own. i can't talk about it to anyone bc it makes people uncomfortable. even other women.

the stigma is so advanced that *even female doctors* (and i speak from experience) don't want/know how to deal with it. roughly 1 in 4 of my menstrual cycles result in hugely debilitating cramps that leave me in the fetal position trying not to breathe too deeply.

it took me until i was 19 to realize that this wasn't normal, and when i brought it up to my doctor, she prescribed me some pain pills and told me to stop drinking caffeine. that's it. (to add insult to injury, the meds don't even work as well as regular ibuprofen.)

this is why we need to start having conversations about periods, early on and with a focus on health. another thing i learned just recently, and from a tumblr post no less: PMS is an actual disorder with actual mental health effects.

for some people, depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as a number of other symptoms, spike in the days before their period actually starts. i don't have "real" depression, but all signs point to my suffering from /menstrual/ depression.

which is also a thing! that i didn't know about until a few months ago! and explains why i'm exhausted and drained and apathetic and cry a lot during some of my periods! isn't that neat? and it's like a roulette wheel, bc sometimes i'm just fine but other times it hits hard.

again, we NEED to be having conversations about these things. so many people like me feel isolated and unable to express their needs during their periods, bc we're not equipped to talk about it and we're conditioned to feel ashamed or disgusted about a completely normal thing.

i can't email a professor, especially a male professor, and go "hey sorry i can't be in class today bc i almost blacked out this morning from period cramps xo." like it's just not socially acceptable. and it NEEDS TO BE. i'm sick of having to live like this!

i'm angry that something as pervasive as menstrual cycles is just completely swept under the rug in daily life. we're not allowed to talk about it, bc it gets us branded as gross or whiny or impolite, but people with uteri have to suffer through it for almost 25% of the year.

i was going to apologize here for the rant but i'm not going to do that because i shouldn't have to. periods are fucking normal and people need to get over it. we have to end the stigma around menstruation, for the sake of dignity, health, and overall well-being. please.