In the wake of International Women’s Day (and another wave of PMS-induced fights with my hubby, god bless his soul), I’m publishing some thoughts about what it means to be born a woman.
Every woman knows what gaslighting means. Not because it’s often gender-based, with females being the victims, but because our bodies gaslight our minds, i.e. we gaslight ourselves. Don’t get confused. Just bear with me.
Gaslighting means manipulating someone using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning. Well, our bodies use psycho-hormonal methods that make us question our own sanity every month. If you’re a person who has ever experienced PMS and periods, or a partner who can anticipate the storm, you know what I mean. And while all the videos online about craving specific snacks and how crazy we can get are funny and all, the reality can be scary.
Every month, a deep dark well of despair opens up, tearing apart my heart and soul. It sucks all my energy, casting an ominous cloud over everything in my life but the doubts, insecurities, and pains. With no mercy, the voice from this well questions how come I’ve thought that I am fine and enough and my life is good. “Your life is miserable,” it whispers. “You’re gonna get fired and divorced because everybody will find out how crazy and worthless you are.” I’m grateful for all the routine tasks that distract me from this voice, but it stays in the background for several days in a row.
Someone–probably a male–can say, “just learn the symptoms and get ready for them; what’s the problem?” The problem is that you can’t make a checklist of symptoms because they can change every month; they depend on many other things; and they hit different as you grow older. I experienced the dreadful thoughts of being crazy and depressed and losing my mind for the first time when I was 27. It took my body more than ten years to start messing with me, and it’s hard to get used to. Every month, I hope that I won’t turn into another person, that I’ll stay myself, but no. I cry uncontrollably, choking on tears. And then, the period arrives, and I breathe out, realizing that it’s not me. It’s my body. And how scary is the idea that you and your body can act against each other? Isn’t it the definition of autoimmune diseases?
I knew I was born with a girl’s body, but only at 11 did I understand what it meant. It was a mindblowing conversation with my friend, and I’m still dealing with its impact. We were walking to school, when she said, “It’s not fair that boys don’t have periods.” I was confused–I didn’t know a whole lot about male bodies–so I said that maybe they do, and we just don’t know about it. Her reply made me question the balance of fairness in this world: “Have you ever seen an ad for any boy-specific thing like those that promote tampons and pads?” The words tampons and pads made us giggle, but below the fun was a tremendous shift in my child’s brain. She was too right.
Since then, I have learned a lot of facts that point to a very unbalanced picture. That for decades drugs were mostly tested on men due to a false belief that female hormones could skew the results. That the whole society is built around the circadian rhythm, relying on a 24-hour clock built-in in every man, and the infradian rhythm–the 28-day clock built in every woman–is given no attention. That even though over 70% of women have needed to take sick days due to period pain, only five countries (out of 195) have menstrual leave policies. And most recently, that men think they can decide what women can and cannot do with their bodies.
However hard it is to feel empowered and powerful (and these are the most common words I’ve seen on social media on the 8th of March) in this–to its core–men’s world, being a woman is a blessing. To quote a powerful girl, Hermione, I have to say that I can’t imagine living with the emotional range of a teaspoon. The rest is figureoutable.