I Got My Period Today: A Story

I got my period today. For the first time in a decade. Well, eight years. The same day I moved into my own apartment.

I had lived in the same four bedroom house for five and a half years. I had fourteen different housemates over the years. Wild, I know.

Not to mention, two cats, two dogs, and two bunny rabbits. I grew up in that house. I learned how to live with people and how to get along; how to disagree and how to move on. I was 24 years old when I moved in. I’m 30 now.

Thirty always felt so old when I was younger. Surely by age 30, I’d have my shit figured out. I’d probably be happily married in a nice house with a steady job and good health insurance. I’d be thinking about kids and vacuum cleaners and my 401k. And while some of that is true (a girl can dream about a Dyson), a lot of it is not.

Here I am, standing on the other side of thirty, knowing that nobody ever really has their shit figured out. We’re all just making it up as we go.

But back to the period point. I had been on hormonal birth control since I was 17 years old. Thirteen years. When I got my first IUD in 2014, I stopped bleeding completely. And while it’s convenient not to have blood pouring from your vaginal canal for a quarter of your adult life, somehow I missed it too. Over the past three months, I had been having horrible pelvic pain. I knew it was the IUD. I knew it had to go.

But when you tell your OBGYN that you want to go off birth control, they make you think you’re crazy for considering it; like they are bought out by big birth control or they simply don’t trust you and what you decide to do with your vulva.

But I did it anyway. Why should I be in pain every day just so a proverbial man might come around and not need to wear a condom?

I’d been wanting to live alone for a long while; sick of conversations about couches and dirty dishes; sick of finding new roommates every year and wondering where they’d land on the spectrum of neat freak to packrat. I had done my time, but I couldn’t imagine affording my own place. (No shade to all of my former roomies… I love you all).

Maybe I’d just wait until someone swept me off my co-housed feet, so that we could move in together, split the cost of rising rent, and live happily ever after in the age of dying capitalism and warming climate. That feels a lot like lodging a T-shaped piece of plastic into my cervix and waiting for a man to come around and not get me pregnant. How romantic.

But after ten adult-ish years in and out of mostly dissatisfying relationships, waiting around those dreams to come true began to feel completely absurd. So I pulled the IUD out of my cervix and pulled myself (and my cat) out of that safety net of my house.

I started bleeding the day I moved out.

Menstruation is the shedding of the uterine lining. Every month, blood and fluid build up along the walls of the uterus, eagerly awaiting a fertilized egg to protect and serve, and when it doesn’t appear, the body releases it all and starts all over again

(Did you know I used to be a middle school health teacher?).

As I move into a home of my own, I feel like I am shedding my protective sheath too. If the dishwasher doesn’t get unloaded, if hair is clogging the drain, if the toilet paper is out, or the rent doesn’t get paid on time, there is nobody to blame but myself. But as I shed this four-bedroom layer and turn the key to my own blank canvas of an apartment, bleeding, I feel like am taking my power back; living my life on my own terms.

I don’t need to wait for someone else to make me happy or horny. I can do both just fine on my own.