I would say I've been having periods for ten years now, but that's not quite true. My first arrived, aged 12, much to my initial delight ("Mum! I've started!"). To me it felt like a warm, grown-up secret, an exclusive members-only club of sophistication and sanitary pads - but that soon wore off. Pain for the week leading up to my period, when the floodgates opened and, with the blood, more pain. A full seven days of this before the countdown began, again, until the next one. I would wake in the night in what looked and, more importantly, felt like a crime scene and drag myself down to the kitchen, where I'd rock on the floor while the kettle boiled to make a hot water bottle. I loathed periods. They turned me into a gibbering, sometimes vomiting wreck and they did so swiftly every thirty-three days (I was so regular for a long time, that it took a long time to reach a diagnosis of PCOS: "oh, you have the other symptoms but you're thin and your periods are regular, nevermind, go away,").
And then, they stopped. In the intervening years, things hadn't gone particularly smoothly. At 19, I finally saw a doctor about the pain that over-the-counter drugs barely made a dent in. He was incredulous and asked why I'd not seen someone before, why I didn't want to go on the pill, how I could cope with that pain every month? I was given the label of menorrhagia (very heavy periods) and a prescription that helped a little bit. A few months later, I decided I couldn't cope with periods any longer, and went to see a nurse about hormonal contraception to get rid of the bloody (pun very much intended) things.
I chose the contraceptive injection, Depo-Provera, because it was long-acting and likely to dramatically lessen bleeding and pain, with lots of people stopping their periods altogether whilst using this method (I have since been told that the injection is a terrible choice for someone with PCOS, but I was undiagnosed at the time). My first period on Depo was a bit better, and then the next one came - and stayed. I had the next injection, and the period continued. The pain crept back up and up and I was given the third injection five weeks early to try and stop the bleeding. Things spiralled from there and soon I was on the pill as well as the injection, taking it back-to-back in the hope that things would just stop. I never had another Depo shot but my body took a long time to reset itself. A year of bleeding and endless GPs and pain which was being investigated as potential endometriosis. I think, now, it may be that the hormonal preparations I fed my body were making it ill, but I'll never know.
All of this further warped my relationship with menstruation: it was now a monster that plagued me all the time. I bled on everything. I missed lectures because I was hunched over the toilet bowl vomiting and then wondering if I could take more Tramadol if I'd thrown it up. I saw my body as this hideous, bulky vessel of something malevolent and I would pinch at it in the bath, wishing I wasn't a woman because look what it had brought me. Eventually, with the help of various drugs and then, finally, the logical thing: no drugs at all, the long bleed stopped and, given time, I went back to having periods: there was time in between them. I still felt as though I'd been punched in the face by this heavy dread every time I saw that blood arrive. I still hated them and what they meant to me. By now they were a lot further-spaced than thirty-three days and I assumed it was just taking a long time for them to get back to "normal", but a year later I realised it had been four months since my last one. It was then that I was diagnosed with PCOS.
As I said earlier, it wouldn't be entirely truthful to say I've been having periods for a decade. They stopped eighteen months ago. You'd think I'd be relieved, and part of me was. But not having them, and not knowing when you'll ever have another, stirred up new emotions. The beast inside me that made me resent the body I was born with was something I now missed. I knew my life was a lot easier without them - by now I was working full-time and had fretted about how I'd cope when my period rolled around - but I felt like that special, grown-up membership had been revoked. I was a fraud. I hadn't thought I set great store by femininity and "being a woman", and motherhood didn't appeal to me, but I now felt like a failure of a woman. Every dry month was a reminder that I was different, and taunted me with infertility. I started telling people: "I don't have periods," and I figured that my Mirena coil was probably stopping them coming back, anyway. It wasn't my fault, I was okay.
A few weeks ago, I had a period. I didn't know how to feel. I didn't know if it was a period. I felt like I must be wrong. But it stayed for seven days and then it dutifully left. And perhaps this is the start of things getting better.
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