My Story

The microcosm is a mirror to the macrocosm.

When it comes to making a better world to bleed in, looking to one’s own world is a great place to start.

This is the personal story of the work I have been doing to make my own world one I like to bleed in...

My menarche at age 15 was welcomed by a mother who made an effort to celebrate and ritualise the event. Looking back, I appreciate how this formational experience laid the foundation for menstrual advocacy now.

The problem was that at the time, the feeling that she created for me and my sisters - of safety, power and pride - was not reflected at all in the menstrual landscape outside the walls of my home. I was quickly seduced by the narrative of hormonal birth control as liberation from the burden of my body.

Despite suppressing my ovulation with the pill, from age 16 to 20 (on and off), the force of cyclical energy within me has always been strong. Although I welcomed by period with some respect thanks to my family culture, I struggled a lot when it came to my pre-menstrum.

I toyed with diagnosis, desperately googling ‘bi-polar’ and ‘PMDD’ late at night.

But something deep within me always kind of piped up… calling for me to see the depression, the grief, the numbness in another light. I thought: This is not something wrong with me. In some way, before I even knew it was cycle related, I understood it as powerful.

Because what is more powerful than those deep, dark, overwhelming feelings? What is more powerful than being thrown into despair that initiates big changes in your life? I didn’t know the word ‘initiation’ then, but I knew about butterflies. I knew about the tight, dark, painful cocoon the caterpillar must retreat into in order to emerge as a butterfly.

I sensed that there was something deeply off with the way western, dominant culture treats these more challenging emotions. The way we approach darkness, the lack of shared ritual for holding each other through small deaths.

However, it was a while before I picked up the book which gave me some language for what I already knew inside (thank you Maisie Hill).

Learning a method of contraception which relied on me taking full responsibility, not outsourcing to a pill, gave me a wakeup call that was deeply challenging at first.

It forced me to step outside of my victimhood and take full responsibility for my body. For the fullness of myself. Because not only could I no longer shift blame about how I felt onto a pill, I could also not shift responsibility for my fertility onto the medical industry.

My cycle was asking me to step fully into the full reality of who I am. The joy, the pain, the grief, and everything inbetween.

Through tracking my cycle energetics and emotions, along with tracking my biomarkers of fertility, I started to build a very real picture of my cyclicality. I started to understand that I had been a round peg trying to squeeze into a square hole.

I started to wonder; is there something wrong with me every month when I experience these symptoms over and over in this pattern, or is it something wrong with the world around me?

I started to question; what is it that my body is yearning for?

I began to ask; what would it be like if I lived in a world that knew how to look after bleeding bodies?

I learned about Red Tent history, where women used to gather together during menstruation, and sing, laugh, tell stories and massage one another in the warm dark.

I thought about pain as a message from the body, not something to be fixed.

I watched the trees, and noticed how the seasons offer them something necessary as they cycle round and round.

Bit by bit, I unlearned shame as I turned towards myself in my premenstrual phase and told myself 'it's safe to let go'.

I disentangled myself from shame, as I said 'I'm not ill, I need a day off because I've got my period'.

I burned shame away as I shared my experience with as many people as would listen. And forgave myself every time I tried to speak up but felt the hand of fear and doubt around my mouth.

This is not a metaphor - our bodies are nature. If the micro is a mirror to the macro - let us look to how we treat nature. Is there any surprise that we are conditioned to respond to our bodies processes with control and force? Is there any surprise that we are taught to look anywhere but inside for answers to our problems, and thus hand out cash to those who provide the answer? Is it not obvious that we are conditioned to relate to our energy as something to exploit and optimise for constant productivity?

But the good news is, it is within our power to remember how to relate to our bodies with reverence and understanding of our inherent beauty, creativity and power.

I found conscious contraception and menstruality to help me do this, and to make my world a little better to bleed in. It is my mission to share the best of what I have, in case it resonates with you, too.

Isobel xxx