My bleed — more than a training metric.
The reverence for my cycle begins intwined in the subtle tentacles of the shame that once gripped my being.
I love that we can harmonise our training and recovery with our menstrual fluctuations, but for me it stands for much more.
My bleed has been a symbol of immense shame and a gateway to a deep sense of pride and pleasure — This is the very nature of relativity and the gift of polarity.
I cannot tell you when I first became self-aware in the shame of my womanhood. In hindsight I see how it seeped into a habitual trail of white lies and secrecy of my teenage and young adult years.
I often ask myself, where did this unshakable shame creep in?
I remember shuffling into a giggle filled room of snickering girls. I sat alongside fellow women with newly formed breasts and hemlines that danced with deplorable. Hiding illegal piercings and wearing black bras under see through material. Desperate to be unique, but terrified to be on the out — I think I am just describing myself minus the newly formed breasts.
Our little Christian Co-ed school doing the best they could to tell us about the birds and the bees without inflicting the rage of conservative parents.
Truth be told, I don’t remember learning much about our cycle…
I do remember learning about the raging hormonal development of our male counterparts. Their urges and vulnerabilities to porn addictions. I remember being told to consider my brothers in the choices of clothing I made or the suggestive actions I might make.
I often think back and wonder what my brothers were told of their sisters. Were they told of the crimson rivers painting thick and thin thighs, as surely as the waxing and wanning of the moon — a tangible allegory of womans divinity and conectivity to mother nature.
Did they celebrated the powerful, intuitive and magical essence of woman…or learn how our needs change dependent on our seasons.
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Perhaps I should consider myself luckier than most.
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My mum bought a book, which we read together one morning. An account of the biological changes I should be expecting. Boiled down to a hefty 15minute conversation.
I guess I filled in the blanks to this induction of womanhood, because from thereon I practically begged my bleed into being.
I spotted for 6months. Excruciatingly impatient, I would study the contents of my knickers. Convincing myself that brown discharge passed for burgundy, which was close enough to red.
Then it FINALLY happened….
I swear I could have stuck my bloody knickers on a flag pole to parade them down the street.
“I AM WOMAN”
But it was always handled in discrete.
And I learnt quickly to hide what made us women unique.
I remember being taught childbearing became treacherously painful as a result of Eve’s deceit — Eve, woman, temptresses, friend of serpents with the dreadful fate of so many at her feet.
Truth be told I’m not really sure when the shame crept in.
Sure, it would be easy to blame my faith based up brining, but I see no exclusions. I’ve come to realise, that perhaps through a different lens, most women have been subjected to conditions that breed shame and insignificance.
Alas, it matters very little when I “experienced” shame.
It doesn’t even matter when I became “self aware” of it. What matters is the realisation that I could experience immense pride of self, as a result of the depths I had been drowning in. The reverence for my cycle, a symbol of this calibration.
Propelled from the deepest of lows. To the highest of highs. To land somewhere in the middle of these polarising, yet corresponding experiences.
This is the very nature of relativity and the gift of polarity. It has taken time, but I think I am catching onto the blueprint of this universal truth.
So in sitting with my blood, I sat with all I deemed unworthy, unclean, unlovable — imposed or self imposed becomes irrelevant.
In my cyclical nature lies a covanent, to love myself wholly.
And I wonder beautiful human…
What subtle tenticles grip at you?
Be brave enough to follow the slimy sucker to its nucleus.
Let it consume you whole.
Like that of a black hole.
Birthing universes from that which you thought made you partial, incomplete.
There are only degrees of separation.
Fragmentation the ultimate illusion.