Dear Women, Dear Witches, Dear Wombs.

On feeling, bleeding and life's changes.

Woman: It’s Not in Your Head.

It’s not in your head…

Not the surges of strange sensations, 

phantom itching,

random tingles,

or raptures of rage. 

You are not imagining…

the brittleness of your hair and nails

the tension in your ligaments.

And that headache,

well…

that is certainly not ‘all in your head’.

The pain in your womb is as real 

as the blood running down your legs.

It is only fairly recent that “women’s troubles” have been acknowledged as real. 

Can you imagine? Even as recently as the 90’s it was largely believed the menstrual pain largely psychosomatic, that it was “all in our heads”. Nevertheless, that did not stop the “industry" from creating a whole host of products that were geared towards sanitizing women’s vaginas, and “disappearing” our periods.  

I wanted my period to disappear. 

When I first began bleeding at age 11, I was completely unprepared. Mom and I had not had “the talk”, and that blood first darkened my pre-adolescent panties whilst I was staying with my great grandparents, my great-grandmother being a woman who already believed I was “growing up too fast”, and looked at the evidence of encroaching womanhood—hips, curves, budding breasts, and now blood—as an imminent threat. 

I remember her fear. It landed in my body. I could not stop the lengthening of my limbs anymore than I could stop the sudden and foreboding smear in my underwear. And fuck her being scared—I was scared! 

My great-grandpa had to go to the store to purchase pads because my grandma didn’t drive. I remember feeling embarrassed, but not even knowing why I did. At that point none of my peers had their period—I was first, just like years later I was the first to get pregnant, and give birth. We didn’t have normal health classes at the school I attended and, even if we did, I doubt at that age we would have gotten to that material.

I felt alone.

When I got home from vacation my mom explained to me what was going on in a bit more detail, and I think we even had a little celebration. However, something that she and I far differed on was our experience of bleeding. She told me later that her mother told her when she first got her period that “It didn’t need to be a big deal, that she didn’t need to have pain, and that life could just go on as normal”. Well, this was my moms’ experience, and lots of other women’s as well as I understand it. That was not the case for me.

My period was practically debilitating. 

I bled so heavily I would soak through an “overnight pad” between lunch and the end of school. That was under 4 hours. I remember being in sixth grade and standing up, turning to look at my yellow chair only to see it smeared in blood, and having to book it to the bathroom to tend to the soggy, saturated aftermath, but not before as, unobtrusively as I could, wiping the stain away with my navy-blue uniform skirt. 

How utterly-fucking-embarassing! 

And it wasn’t just the embarrassment of being the only girl who had crossed this initiation in my class—the pain, at times, was unbearable. I spent many afternoons up in the attic of our little schoolhouse in Emigrant, MT lying in a semi-fugue state. Considering that I used to bleed every 28 days or so (I didn’t actually keep track until recent years), but let’s say, figuratively, for 2 days out of 30 for the last 32 years I have felt like shit each month. 

That is a lot of necessary downtime, time I did not always give myself, time a lot us women cannot give ourselves because as “functioning members of society” we are supposed to pretend this is not happening. 

(Rage tears and shaking) FUUUCK THIS!!

Now as I find myself tickling the edges of perimenopause, my cycles are even more wacky. I had 17-day-cycle this time. I don’t even know how I fully shed the lining of my uterus, grew another one, had an estrogen peak, level, and drop, complemented with another shed, which I am currently sitting in—blood-towel wrapped around my waist as I type. 

I am fucking exhausted!

I’ve been on the verge of tears for the last 2 days, could not leave my house yesterday, and I have done nothing but eat, sleep, and submerge myself in the bathtub.

For a lot of women PMS is no different than having a mini flu, and in some ways worse. Do you bleed when you have the flu? No. Not unless it is ebola or something. And yet women have no accommodations afforded to them during this “time of the month” or later when we cross the bridge into perimenopause (where I am currently dancing), and later into full-blown menopause. 

It’s barely even talked about. 

So I’m talking about it.

I have been making posts on my social media for several years every time Aunt Flow visits me about the merits of free-bleeding, tracking our cycles (instead of using hormone-wrecking birth control), and even celebrating our blood. I have gotten a wealth of appreciation from women for “talking about this openly”. I have gotten a bit of flak from insecure men about how my own “cunt-lovin ways”, to steal Inga Muscio’s phrase, are nothing more than misandry.

Yes, how dare I talk about women’s rights to feed ourselves and navigate our monthly cycles, what a man-hating, fucking harpy I am! For all I know, it was an interaction such as that which got my Facebook account disabled around this time last year. And if that is the case… then here we go again.

We need to talk about this. 

We, women, need to know we are not alone, and that there is nothing wrong with us for feeling this way—whatever way it is that we feel.

The intentional destruction of women’s lore and women’s “medicine” is one of the ongoing losses that we need to recognize as a result of the Inquisition. Ya know, that period of time of say, ohhh, about 500 years when women were methodically hunted, tortured, and murdered for “knowing things”.

What exactly did we know? 

We knew how to birth babies, as well as end pregnancies. We knew herbs and potions that would keep a body from becoming pregnant and how to get the womb to release that seed if it was unwanted. Yes, the very struggles for rights and bodily-autonomy that women still face today are the very same things that we were murdered in the millions for a few hundred years ago. 

It is fundamentally the knowledge of our own bodies and cycles that makes us women so very bloody dangerous, apparently. 

And it’s not just the physical effects of our cycles either; it is the very real psycho-emotional ones as well. Yes, we feel different before, during, and after a bleed.

I actually resent the fact that there has become this inverse thing around saying that yeah:

“I acted “that way” (crazy!) because I am fucking bleeding, and my sanity physically feels like it is seeping out onto my thighs as I speak.”

It’s like admitting that we are subject to our cycles, have hormonal highs and lows, as well as emotional dips and peaks, is somehow ani-feminist. 

Well, this is one of the reasons I don’t identify as a feminist.

I’m not interested in moving through the world as a woman imitating a man, and though that seems to represent the early 90’s model of feminism more than today’s, with women in their “power suits” climbing the corporate ladder, that is still latently in there and I don’t fucking want it. And for all my own “cunt-lovin” liberation, I have no interest in “putting down” men. I love men, and I want them to be men in the same way I very differently want to be left to explore my own womanhood—without grafting my identity onto some social construct.

I am a messy woman. 

And getting in touch with my own blood, my cycles, and what I need when I am in the midst of them has only made me more so. I refuse to pretend I am not feeling what I am, or that I am not fucking bleeding—and I am going to keep talking about it.

I once held an online circle called “The Way of Womb: Embracing Womanhood, Stories & Myths”. Maybe it’s time to start it back up again. 

What do you think?

PS…this is a book chapter! I’m working diligently and determinedly on “Walking the Ways of Witchood: Growing up, Growing Wise, and Making a Mess.” (Still settling on the title, but that feels pretty good.)

Your support and readership means the world to me.

Thank you and lotsa love,

~Justice