Letter to Self
By Joycelyn Zhang
It was the day of your school’s 5K. Sweltering.
You ran until your lungs wheezed. Your shorts were green, like everyone else’s, and together you were a forest from the waist down. You forced yourself to drink the sludgy fountain water and ignored the way it stung your convulsing throat. You ignored the sharp running cramps that stabbed your stomach, the ones that usually attacked your sides. You ignored it—until you felt something gush into your green shorts. Damn it. Meekly, you excused yourself and tried not to waddle as you entered the cool of the locker room.
With toilet paper at the ready, you pulled down your shorts, exposing tender, indented flesh. You expected the stale stench of urine, but found, instead, that red sap had trickled down your thighs and bloomed in your underwear.
You weren’t injured and you weren’t dying. Nothing had pierced your skin, and yet you were bleeding. But instead of screaming like you wanted to, you limped back into the heat, breathing quick and tight. You remember saying something vague to the (male) gym teacher, something about needing to see the nurse. You remember the nurse’s gentle, rehearsed tone as she pointed you to the bathroom. The rest of the day, you felt all the eyes on you—classmates, teachers, janitors—seeing through your clothes, into your shame. The shame raged hot and cold down your spine when you told your parents you’d gotten your period. You were taught to scrub and scrub and scrub the stiffened blood in the bathroom sink—it couldn’t mix with the wash and contaminate the other clothes. And you scrubbed until there was no trace of the red sap and your fingers started peeling around the edges.
You rarely went shopping with your parents after that, too afraid of walking down the Feminine Hygiene aisle, slipping packages of pads in the cart. You couldn’t bear to look at the cashier’s face as he scanned the boxes. Alone in your room, you wondered why there was a price tag on menstruation.
Now, you get pissed when period ads interrupt YouTube videos, portraying empowered, graceful women prancing on stages or grassy fields as though there isn’t a stick of cotton tearing at their insides. Somehow, you just know a man pitched the design.
Now, your clothing resents you. None of your underwear escapes unstained. You hate sitting down in public, worried about what might show when you stand up again. You hate your dance tights and leotard, and how they barely cover anything.
Guys seem different now. Their eyes widen and they pretend to vomit if the “P” word comes up. When your brother knocks over the grocery bag, sending a package of pads popping out at him, he screams and locks himself in his room. Even your dad whispers “Period” like it’s some taboo thing. They act afraid when it comes to your period, yet they insist it’s the reason you have differing opinions—nothing short of hormonal insanity could explain why you would disagree with them. You hate how they leave their marks on everything that isn’t theirs, be it a form of childbirth or a woman’s reproductive organs or even the words that are supposed to belong to you and the girls around you. You hate how the woman is always blamed for the pregnancy, shamed for sleeping around. Men are aggressive go-getters who deserve the submission from all women they are attracted to, remember?
You hate everything. You’re not even sure if it’s of your own volition or if it’s because you’re on your period. Because you’re ON your period as you write this. And this time, it’s personal. Like (S)Mother Nature had a boxing match with your uterus and the uterus is losing. Unfortunately for you, it never throws in the towel. So you have no choice but to soldier on (like a woman).
And in these moments, you scream and curse all gods from every religion possible for bringing this burden to womankind, and to you, in particular.
Childbirth isn’t something you ever want to go through, so what’s the point of having a period at all? You have to wonder if something’s wrong with you because in the single eye of society, those eggs, those promises of another human being, are (most of) what you’re valued for. They are the reason laws about women’s bodies are written and passed by men, the reason everything about them is sexualized, magnified, condensed into beautified fodder for men’s viewing pleasure. You’re nothing but fertile ground waiting for seeds.
What if you refused? What if you stood up and wiped away all that dirt and ripped the trowels from their greedy hands? You’d be free—but would you really be a woman? What is a woman without her children?
And what of those people whose lives will never cross yours—who, despite all your differences, share this invisible connection with you? Here’s where you know the patriarchy has succeeded: you feel so isolated in your room, watching shadows dance upon the tampon-white ceiling.
Yesterday, you were in the school bathroom with another girl. A girl who giggled as she tugged one of the cheap school tampons from the dispenser. The tampon expanded with sink water—a soggy, unusable joke. Her perfume clouded your brain, and you avoided her gaze in the mirror. She was a girl, too, wasn’t she?
You wanted to say, “You’re not just a girl. You’re not bloodstained underwear or a wrinkled tampon. You’re not a cherry, an oven, a fertile field. You are human.”
Period.
But you didn’t.
Joycelyn Zhang is a San Diego writer whose work strives to examine the deep-seated biases present in modern culture. She is a second-generation immigrant living in a bifurcated world. Her work has been featured in Élan Literary Magazine.
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