Have you noticed how much *planning* goes into having periods? Not just the bloody part, but the whole entire cycle of predicting fertile times and being prepped for whatever could happen every week (if not every day) of the month.
We who menstruate at the very least want to make sure we’re not caught off guard when the blood and stuff starts flowing; we want to make sure we have supplies to keep things from getting visibly messy. We want to make sure we don’t get pregnant if we don’t want to be, or that we’re ready to fuck at egg popping time if we do. All of that takes PLANNING.
Most of us would readily acknowledge that being ready for ovulation and menstruation takes planning. But how many of us go a few steps further into actually visualizing a *perfect* day on our period, and planning to attain and experience a totally elevated day of menstruation?
I turn fifty-two this month, and I’m still getting the hang of having periods. I don’t feel like an expert at menstruation or full-cycle preparedness. While I’ve gotten better at it as I’ve gotten older, for most of the almost-forty years I’ve been menstruating (jesus christ that’s a long time) I was *not* able to predict when my period would come. My periods were almost always more than a week late, having me on 35+ day cycle of hell with weeks of terrible PMS and extremely painful laborious periods including nights of sleepless agony.
In my younger years I would have loved to experience the regularity and relative ease I began to enjoy in my forties, being able to feel when I ovulate and having my period arrive every 27-29 days, bringing with it relatively mild cramps I can easily tolerate with minimal over-the-counter medication.
Since then I’ve come to understand I probably was not ovulating much at all before then due to living in chronic stress (in large part due to AuDHD). When you are under stress, what does your body do? Your body shuts down functions that are not needed for immediate survival. If you’re an animal being chased by a lion who is going to rip your guts out of it you don’t get away, digesting a meal and getting pregnant are not at the top of your list of priorities.
I lived most decades of my life just trying to survive and fit into a world not designed for people like me. As a result, my reproductive and digestive systems were almost-constantly on pause, with shitting and ovulating put on the way back burner.
It’s a vicious circle, existing in a constant state of fear for your life from amorphous non-lion/tiger/bear threats that surround you and assault your senses (and sense of self) around the clock, leading to sleep deprivation and nightmare disturbances, wicked constipation, and pretty acute mental illness feels from fucked-up hormones all leading to MORE stress that keeps you from being able to rely on yourself to poop, sleep deeply, or pop eggs once a month (ideally/normally leading to a normal period two weeks later and some predictability of hormone shifts with a limit on how long the PMS-ish suffering would go on).
While I did get relief off and on from hormonal birth control and stimulants prescribed for ADD, it’s taken many years to recognize, accept, appreciate and understand the extent to which I have to design my life around the way my brain is wired to perceive and process the world around me. I need a lot of time alone, and layers of protection to feel safe and be protected from overwhelming stimuli, expectations, and demands that I perform in accordance with social norms that I cannot consistently pass.
Essentially, trying to be “normal” (and regularly failing) means sacrificing my health and well-being on pretty basic levels of functionality (being able to eat, sleep, poop, and have a normal menstrual cycle).
When you can’t predict events, it’s harder to plan for them. For example, if you are someone who is on call or whose schedule varies from week to week and can’t predict when you will have time off of work, it’s hard to plan rewarding vacations or holidays. If you can’t predict when or if you’ll be able to have a bowel movement, it’s hard to plan even a daily schedule where you can rely on your body to cooperate with when you’d like to perform a satisfying personal hygiene ritual. If you can’t predict when you will be hungry enough to eat since you are so stressed out you have no appetite or even regularly feel like vomiting from “nerves”, it is hard to plan meals (or to know when to *stop* eating when you recognize every opportunity to consume food as life-or-death).
When you are just trying to get by and survive, long-range and even short-term planning isn’t something most of us get in the habit of or even perceive as feasable or likely to result in achievement or success. So while I’ve had dreams and desires, I haven’t really been able to forecast a future where it seems realistic I’d be able to rely on myself and the world I live in to consistently produce the basic ingredients for big goal achievement. If you can’t predict your periods, your appetite, your bowel movements, or your brain’s ability to process and crank out WORDS and coherent sentences, you can’t plan on a fuck of a lot. Instead you really learn it’s more realistic to plan on being incapacitated with little more than a moment’s notice when so much is out of your control. You could be incapacitated by a blinding migraine, by the inability to distinguish between engine noises and a voice on a phone, or by the need to sleep dropping you down that dizzying elevator shaft like in bed except you are in a public venue attending something you really wanted to experience but now you have to close your eyes and lay down or you’ll have some kind of a seizure it feels like. You could be at a social or work function when the worst cramps kick in and you’ve taken the maximum allowed dosages of all the pills but it still hurts so bad when some giant flesh fillets try to surge through your cervix that you are shaking and can’t suppress a gasp when another huge wave of pain clamps down on every morsel of abdomen and more, from mid-thigh to mid-back.
When what you can plan on is that you can’t plan on anything at all, realistically you just have to start planning on doing *less*. With years and then decades of your brain and body being disappointingly undependable in so many situations we’re taught are normal, required, and reasonable parts of everyday life, it just makes sense to reduce your goals and aspirations and desires to just trying to avoid getting caught out with your blood and guts and brains doing antisocial and unprofessional things nobody out there wanted to make appearances at this party or that meeting.
Unless you are fortunate enough to learn about, accept and embrace who you are, the ways you are, and what makes you thrive. THEN you can visualize and plan for and work towards something better than just surviving, escaping, and avoiding. And I am just such a fortunate person. My irregular periods and the suffering that’s come with those cycles and all of these years I’ve lived, and experiencing them getting *better* the more stability, solitude, love, acceptance, and protection I’ve had — these are some really solid and significant evidence and exceptionalities that demonstrate yeah … I’m not normal. THAT is what I can plan on: plan on my abnormalities.
After processing some of the grief that goes along with acknowledging all of the things you *can’t* do — the things there are not enough time in the day, week, season, or year once you accept and account for the number of hours you need to rest in a room where you are not perceivable by others and can’t hear outside noise, for example, you can start allowing yourself to plan to meet your needs *first*. When you recognize those needs are real and that you do not function and are physically sick when those needs go unmet, you need to stop feeling ashamed by it and be glad you know, and allow yourself to meet your needs with joy and gratitude. And then? To plan to actually allow yourself to experience PLEASURE. We are all of us designed to FEEL GOOD. Not all the time, and not to never feel bad. But shit … as much as possible without hurting others. PLAN TO FEEL *GOOD*.
Planning to feel good should be an integral part of planning to do your best! If you never feel good, you will never be at your best. You might be the best at what other people want from you, but it won’t be sustainable in the long run if you always put being your best for others before being your best real good-feeling healthy self.
Most of my life I’ve felt and been told that you should always put yourself LAST. You always need to put other people first: that is love. Choosing to enjoy time alone is *selfish*. You need to meet your social obligations FIRST in order to earn the privilege of your dirty selfish individual needs, and even then … better to hide all of that or figure out some way of doing it in service to others. Basically the only time I’ve been given permission or a pass to really remove myself from social obligations is when I am physically sick. At any other time it is frowned upon to lie in bed with a book for a whole day. Honestly, being sick is also frowned upon in entirity, but at least it will be sort of excused. With frowning consternation and judgment. But it better not last long! Five days of sick leave a year! That’s it! That’s all you’re allowed. Easily eaten up by cramp days.
Then a few years ago I started listening to rich guys who made money doing things I was doing in 2001-2003 (but I thought instead I should focus on doing *other* things the *harder* ways). I listened to the permission they give themselves to do relatively mediocre work as easily as possible for the maximum amount of pay. And I especially listened to how they motivated themselves. By finding “a powerful enough why” for moving forward. By identifying and “visualizing the perfect day” to work towards.
I realized that never allowing myself to plan a day, weekend or vacation off for myself without first planning to try to meet social obligations and fulfill social and family expectations means I never permitted myself to actually work towards anything truly rewarding or restorative. I could only earn permission to grant myself what I want and need most by doing more work (unpaid social work) after work-for-money. What almost-always happens, though, is I make myself sick and exhausted with the social work, and on top of it often behave or perform poorly so there is MORE work and suffering trying to make that right and recover from the mistakes I make. There was never any time left for the really rewarding stuff after that, and usually I just incurred more debts to myself and to others that I wind up worse off than before that “time off”. Which is why I tried to build all of the rewards and solitude into what I get paid to do, or in general have chosen to work on holidays and weekends and forego vacations. This is also why I often chose to meet social needs via fucking, but that’s another story. I’m already way off track when I intended to talk primarily about planning for the perfect period.
I have a long way to go in clarifying visions for what my perfect life looks like, one perfect day at a time. But I am closer to it now that I know passing for some kind of normal and fulfilling social obligations is not “a powerful enough why” to work towards (along with being a recipe for failure and physical incapacitation). Maybe starting in my fifties is a pretty late start. But as improbable as it sounds, it is *not* actually unrealistically *too* late: after all, here I am having a lovely normal period on day 28/day 01 of my cycle in the month of March when I am due to turn 52. I can’t *count* on turning fifty-two in a couple of weeks — I could of course die before that — but I can fucking plan on it, like I can plan on the sun coming up tomorrow morning even though an asteroid could *possibly* take out the whole planet before I wake up.
I can plan on having another period after this one, and by the looks of things a bunch more after that. Even though the women I know my age and younger are all deep in perimenopause, I am not experiencing the suffering and unpredictability and other symptoms they are complaining of; I went through a lot of that and worse in my teens and twenties and thirties. It is not usual for periods to be more regular and happy in someone’s late forties than in their twenties. But here I am: a weirdo. I can plan on that: being weird and abnormal.
So I am going to clarify and envision what a perfect week of menstruation would look like for me. What a perfect first day and night of my period would look and feel like. What I would do, and eat, and experience, and enjoy. And work towards making it happen: being able to depend on myself to protect, celebrate, and nourish my body.
What do I need to do to be able to rely on myself to make time and space for my body to do its things, and to recover from the muscular, fluid-filled, hormone-shifting, wacky-ass process of menstruation?