There are days lately when I wish I was a news blogger, writing about current events with a concrete pseudonymous identity on a regular basis rather than a rarely-updated vague identity project that concerns maybe 0.5 people besides yours truly.

Two of those reasons have come up lately: the can of worms regarding media coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting (regarding Asian-American identity and mental health patient rights), and the thing I am going to talk about right now, news that a no-periods-ever birth control pill is likely going to be approved by the FDA soon.

Although it has not that much to do directly with the issues I'm dealing with now, that provoked the creation of this blog, the pill after all has quite a bit to do with my self-identity as a chick, and so I think it's fair game in a broad sense.

Full disclosure: I have always hated getting a period. Historically I have suffered from debilitating cramps around that time, not to mention dramatic mood instability that I can only guess is directly related to my having bipolar disorder. The only "mental health" medication that I've found to have a consistent, if small, pallative effect is extended-cycle oral contraceptives (and to a lesser extent, regular old OCs).* But I hate having to drag out these "health reasons" as if there is no legitimate reason for just hating having to deal with a period. I am never going to have kids, by choice, and I don't particularly care about fertility or motherhood. So why on earth should I be comforted by something like a visible sign of my own ability to procreate? Why should I want to put up with an unpleasant experience on a regular basis if I don't have to?

So I would say that despite my "legitimate" health reasons for choosing the no-period route as much as possible, my main reason for being on extended-cycle oral contraceptives is so I never, ever have to deal with hormone-related mood swings, and have a period as rarely as possible.

When I saw that a no-period-ever pill is coming on the market, my heart leapt up in joy. You have no idea: this is absolutely the stuff of dreams for me.**

Then I kept reading the article on it. It was packed to overflowing with quotes from women who consider their periods "natural" and "a part of being a woman," as essential to their female identity. They went on at length about how "women shouldn't prevent periods" because they personally valued theirs. Their reasoning was largely "it's natural" and "it's a reliable indicator that you're not pregnant, so reduces anxiety." I agree with them wholeheartedly that biological women often (but not always) have regular periods as part of their non-pharmaceutically-modified lives, and that periods indeed tell one she is not pregnant.

But.

Those women do not speak for this woman.

This woman could not care less about what is "natural" (given the problematic nature of the definition and use of this term in the first place - no pun intended). I do not consider my period any more a part of my essential female nature than shaving my legs. (Which, incidentally, I also choose to not to trouble myself with.) But when I think about it, there is not much about my identity - which necessarily includes my identity as a woman, given that I in fact am one - that is based in my natural, fertile potential for child-rearing, or anything related to it. It's a bothersome biological function with no more importance to me than farting. I cannot identify with women who choose to make that part of their biology a defining factor of their existence.

I realize, only too well, that we do live in a society that values women more for their child-producing than anything else. I do realize that we cannot help but to be affected by this. Trust me, I have dealt with this every time I reveal that I am not going to be a breeder. "You'll change your mind!" Sure. Once my womanly essential nature kicks in. It'll be any day now.

What frustrates me so much is the fact that this pill is a fucking godsend to women like me, and to women who for any reason don't want to put up with the bullshit that is inconvenient biological functions, and yet it is being framed as an insidious threat to women who (over)value their "essential female nature." My answer to them is not to take it. No one's forcing anyone. In fact, it will not even be that widely accessible, since one needs to have access to a doctor to prescribe it, and the cash to purchase it (since it won't be generic for a damn long time).

The article talked about a documentary being shown about the question of getting rid of one's periods. It's apparently being posed as some kind of ethical dilemma that needs to be dwelled upon at length. I am calling bullshit on this because from my perspective (a cranky one, I know, but it's all I've got) it is a personal choice, and it's only a dilemma if you somehow do not understand whether you, personally, like having a period or not. If you do, then stay the hell away from this medication!

And for fuck's sake, stop trying to speak for all women, and stop trying to eliminate choices for women that don't value their god-given natural feminine biology, and who choose to value themselves for something more meaningful.


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* The number of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs I have gone through are legion. I neither want nor need your advice on this count.

** Yes, I realize that one can do this with regular OCs by never taking the placebos (or taking a week off), and that the packaged fewer-periods or no-periods pills are a total rip-off. Still, I have never found a doctor who will actually prescribe OCs for me in this way, so I'm stuck paying for the ones that are marketed in this way.
posted by m 0 comments 15:52

In just about a week, it will be four years since I left college, the same amount of time I spent there.

It doesn't feel like it has been that long since I was there, in a different city, with different friends. With different priorities and a completely different outlook. Another personality. Another life.

I have been horribly homesick for my friends there in the recent months. I have been nostalgic for the first two or three years I was there, for warm rainy days in late spring, afternoons spent sitting on my second-floor balcony talking on the phone. Many of my memories are sensory rather than events, and it's the smell of wet black spring earth, the color of shockingly bright new green grass and small leaves against dark wet branches, that I've been daydreaming about so much. It is always afternoon, and I think of walking down the street after these rains. Everything is wet and lukewarm, and there is a smell in the air of something changing. The brick houses are wet and old, the sidewalks are broken and uneven, and bus engines are echoing through the concrete cavity of the wet busway below my street.

When I think of that sound of the lightest rain on the balcony roof, sitting down there with the cat looking out between the wood slats at the tree branches even with the height of the floor, waiting for my then-boyfriend to get home from work on a Friday evening so we can cook dinner and fall asleep in the living room: it is so nostalgic that it hurts. It makes my heart lonely for an imaginary social world I had there, then. When I lived there, in reality, I remember being miserable. The place didn't suit me and I never felt comfortable. I was often feeling loney and displaced and unhappy. But I miss being on those streets with my friends, and feeling that warm easy comfortableness of just being together with them, with nothing needing to be planned or said.

I don't have that here yet and it is frustrating to feel like I have no one to call when I just want to talk for no reason; or worse, when I want to talk for a reason that is weighing on me.

Anyway.

I have been so nostalgic for this sensory moment and this assumption of a safe network of friends, and yet when I stopped to think about it, I barely recognize myself then. I try to remember what I had been thinking; I go back and read my old journals, my old emails, try to imagine my old mentality. I am surprised to find that I am nothing like what I was four years ago, two years ago, even nine months ago.

What surprises me even more is that despite the fact that I feel so separated and detached from my past, like I have been dislodged so thoroughly from the environment of my childhood, is that I feel closer emotionally to who I was as a teenager than who I was last summer.

Why?

I turned this thought over and over in my head as I fell asleep last night, and came back to one of the reasons that I began this project in the first place. I have felt profound loss lately, in many respects: loss of love, loss of support, loss of my family and my home. But the biggest loss by far is a loss of identity. It is not a recent loss, but one that I have only recently realized consciously. The loss began so long ago that I hesitate to call it that, only because I am not a big believer in a constant core of self that one carries along over a lifetime. Loss implies that I had that core, I misplaced it, and I have retrieved it. I think it is rather that I have returned to a situation and an emotional place that I have not felt in nearly ten years.

The situation is one of loneliness, and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. I am in a loneliness that comes from not being in a long-term relationship that automatically colors my plans, my day, my desires, my fears, and my self. It is a loneliness that forces one to stop and think: what do I want to do? What do I want to do with today, with my summer, with my evening, with my life? And unlike the past eight years, I no longer have the determining factor of a significant other. I am the only one who can make these decisions, and this is not something I am used to anymore.

I realize more and more that, as I wrote already, the fact of a long-term serious boyfriend has meant that I change myself according to my view of what he would want, before he has a chance to ask. I am not blaming anything on the people I have dated, that they tried to change me. Rather, I did it myself out of fear that what I was already was not enough, or it was not right, or it was too much. I did this completely without realization of what I was doing. It was only after the fact, when I was suddenly alone and found myself utterly destroyed, that I realized it was not just the relationship that had done it. It was my own desire to change, to be the ideal for someone else.

I was so subsumed in this, and it was so unconscious, that my realization now of what was happening has made me into a completely different person. I am becoming confident in myself again, in a way that I hadn't been since high school. I had been wondering for years: what happened to that confident girl? And it makes me scared in the pit of my stomach to realize that I had buried her underneath layers of uncertainty and insecurity, layers and layers of self-doubt.

Now that I am emerging from behind those layers, trying as hard as I can to push them off, I am forced to return back to a point before this had begun, and I think that is why I can identify with my teenage self, the one who had not yet developed an insecurity about being desired and being loved. And these layers of rotting detrius that I am trying to push away are so heavy that I don't know if I could do it without the knowledge that there is, in fact, a self-identity I can try to get back to (or go forward with) that is something other than the attempt to be someone else's ideal.
posted by m 0 comments 10:20