Reclaiming myself in 2014

At the beginning of 2013, I was freshly diagnosed with PCOS, stumbling along trying to eat lower GI, cramping badly from a recently-fitted Mirena coil and wondering if I'd ever have another period. I was expecting hair to start to melt away and skin to clear and happiness to sprout out of nowhere but I wasn't sure how I was going to get there. I didn't quite know what I was up against and it was daunting.

A year later and I'm in love with my Mirena, my skin's miles better and I've started to get the hang of which grains when with what (and why is wheat such an enigma?) I'm still steadily growing hairier and it's knocked my confidence a bit further but I'm taking steps to reclaim myself from this condition - steps which began in August when I said hello to hairy pits and realised that hair is just hair. In contrast, 2013 was also the year I was prescribed Vaniqa cream for hirsutism - and the year I said "Sod that," and stopped using it. I began to arm myself with more facts, went to my first Verity conference and started looking forward with a scrap of hope, rather than dread.

In 2014, I'm going to start talking in more depth about some of the things I've just mentioned, and I'm going to keep loving myself and turning every sweetie recipe into a low GI reality. 2014 is about self-care and agave nectar!

This new year, join me in my resolution to be my very best with PCOS and not in spite of it! XXX

Armpits4August, Armpits4ever, Armpits4me

Flaunting my pit kittens #pitpride

In my last post, I mentioned the fantastic fundraising efforts of the Armpits4August team. Last summer, they set up a now annual charity event, the premise of which is simple: participants do not shave their underarms for the month of August, and collect donations for this. All the money from this sponsored fluffathon goes to Verity, who can't afford to keep running as a charity without these donations! As well as this, it's an excellent platform for raising awareness of PCOS and its symptoms ("I'm being hairy because..."), and a ripe opportunity to reclaim your own body and challenge the societal ideal of a hairless woman.

I happened upon a brief news story about the campaign mere weeks before the month began and knew I had to do it, otherwise I would probably hate myself until the next one rolled around. As a woman with PCOS, I've spent perhaps the past year or so admiring body hair on a lot of my friends, but not believing I'd ever reach a stage where I felt comfortable enough to grow out my own. Supposedly "hirsute" (although I'm beginning to wonder what "normal" actually looks like), most of the problems I have with myself revolve around hair and the feelings of otherness they stir in me. Had it not been for Armpits4August, I'd quite probably never have felt strong enough to challenge those feelings - but I did.

I was terrified: I didn't want to tell people my reasons for doing it. I didn't want to have to explain hirsutism, because that meant admitting to people that I was hairy in ways they had never imagined. I spent a week sternly talking myself into it and made a JustGiving page so that I couldn't back out. It went live on the last evening of July. Before August arrived, I'd already raised almost £100. From then, I knew it would be worth it.
I threw myself into the cause. The first hurdle was telling my colleagues. A couple of exclamations of disgust aside, it wasn't half as bad as I'd expected. I bombarded all social networks with talk of hair and impatiently willed my pit kittens to grow. I kept an "armpit diary" and even went on BBC Radio to talk about it (I have friends in high places, if BBC Tees constitutes a high place, which I think it does!).

After a year of silence, I'd opened the Pandora's box of PCOS and I couldn't shut up about it! Everyone I spoke to got an earful about body hair; any premature discussion of Movember was met with interjections about my own hairy fundraising and I began to nurse ideas of starting a PCOS blog (well, here we are...). At the end of the month, I dyed my pits pink, as promised on my JustGiving page, and then, well, I kept them. It took me an entire month to grow them, after all! But more than a bit of fur in a place it should have been anyway, what Armpits4August gave me was pride in my own body. In leaving these two little patches of hair be, I feel so much more control than I ever feel in my frantic attempts to keep the rest of it at bay. I've not backed away from the tweezers just yet, but I've learnt to like my body. Thank you, A4A. Same time again next year?*

*(already taking suggestions for what I'll do now my armpits are already luscious and long)

Although August has long since been and gone, there is still time to make a donation at my JustGiving page until the end of November. Any amount is greatly appreciated!

To join the discussion about body hair in a safe forum, you can find Armpits4August on Facebook and Twitter.