Periods test my biggest lesson from pole dancing which is: how do you love your body when you don’t really like your body?
I’m sorry to do the uterine equivalent of a dick-swing, and I hate to boast, but: I am a very heavy bleeder. Every month gifts me at least 2 or 3 days of mental fog and a general swirling “oh god” while my body is determined to empty itself. To give you a rough idea: I went to see Napoleon and during the Battle of Austerlitz, as pools of blood gathered around chunks of blown off limbs across the ice I thought: “Amateurs. If I wanted to see this, I’d just look in my pants.”
Work is not structured for people who menstruate, give birth, breastfeed or go through menopause. I’m freelance which, in theory, gives me more flexibility to reduce my workload and commitments while I’m in the menstrual trenches, and take on more on the other side of my cycle. In reality: No. You cannot girlboss a womb.
The heaviest part of my cycle almost always coincides with when I need to e.g. sleep in a field in Wales for a festival, give a big presentation at my day job or spend hours cramped on a train, trying to sit as close as possible to the loo. Other people have it a lot worse. My friends in full service sex work usually can’t miss bookings while they’re menstruating, and just use a hidden sponge. Sometimes men’s obliviousness about how women’s bodies actually work is not entirely a disadvantage.
I’ve reached a level of acceptance about this, especially now that I use the pole with stand-up and have committed to more physically demanding work. Last year while I was previewing and working on Pole Yourself Together!, show dates fell like clockwork onto the heaviest days of my cycle. Because previews were so few and far between and logistically difficult to come by, I just had to accept some shows would be bloodier and more tiring than others. I had to cancel one show during the month at the Edinburgh Fringe because I was in so much period pain I couldn’t move. Otherwise, I just slept as much as possible, loaded up on paracetamol and had to suck it up. There’s a section at the end of the show where I change into a pair of white shorts: once, during the less than five minutes I had them on, I bled right through them. Doing this with my legs wide open, bloodstained crotch brightly lit and on full display, made the show much more of a feminist statement than I’d originally planned.
While I’ve been trying different medical ways to reduce the intensity of this (more of that in a second) I’ve also worked on scheduling, within realistic expectations, more recovery time and blocked off periods for rest while I’m bleeding. The process has been frustrating, but has surprised me how helpful it’s been to re-evaluate my relationship with work – especially within the creative industries.
When I structure my work life around non-negotiable time off to let my body do its thing, the shape looks very different. Artists usually have a different timetable to standard 9-to-5 weekends and annual leave anyway, but it’s been interesting to discover what I allow to fall to the side when I put my body’s needs first. I often feel like a thorn in the side of creative workplaces for asking irritating questions like “how is everyone getting paid?” which I think should not even be questions. And more broadly, setting the dials of what you’re willing or not willing to commit to for what pay just comes with maturity, earning your stripes in whatever nebulous currencies of your medium is (e.g. competition titles for pole dancers, a good review or TV credit for a comic) and your own shifting priorities. But what I’ve taken away from re-interrogating my own ways of working around a pesky and tiresome womb is that, generally, these careers will work you to depletion until you say stop.
Katherine Ryan has described the emotional labour of being in a bad relationship with a man like playing at the slot machines in a casino: endlessly feeding in quarters in the hope that at some point you’ll hit the jackpot – but whatever happens, the house always wins. That rings very true with how my friends and peers have described working in the arts. Many structures exist to keep gobbling your work, creativity and time in the vague promise of some kind of windfall, jackpot moment that will make it all pay off. Approaching my work and restructuring it – where I can – around the principle that my body has parameters for me to treat it better, instead of a nagging inconvenience to productivity, has been transformative in how I value and organise my own time.
It’s a lifelong project to figure out how the pie chart of things I do to make money, work I do for the passion and love of it, and then all the other emotional and practical admin that makes life real and worthwhile hangs together. Sometimes a big offer will come in right at the point in my cycle where I’d much rather be sprawled out in a heap and free-bleeding, and I just have to make it work. But generally, welcoming the part of my body that is literally a bloody nuisance has revealed better guidelines for how to build a more sustainable and long-term roadmap through it.
I don’t love the idea of disclosing to an employer that I need accommodations during certain times of the month for menstrual stuff, but I’m raging more at the invisibility of menstrual needs from employment and medical structures. Before switching to the medication I’m on now which reduces the severity of bleeding, I went on a hormonal contraceptive for three months which had a one in three chance of stopping my periods, which I was more than willing to try. The contraceptive implant had the reverse effect on me and made me bleed nearly solidly for three months, plus what felt like being hit by a freight train of depression, unpredictable mood swings and, weirdly, constantly itchy tits. Which to be fair, as a contraceptive, made it work pretty well.
I saw a GP about this and when I described the effects she patiently explained that yes, women had often reported this, but there’s no evidence. I blinked, not sure if I was hearing her properly. I guess I was naïve to think the value of women’s lived experience might get some attention from doctors if streams of people were coming in like me, unable to work or enjoy anything because your menstrual healthcare is doing more harm than good. But maybe, as with the majority of sexual assault cases or workplace harassment reports, that isn’t “evidence.” It’s just “women giving you information.”
Periods suck! I’ve not quite* gone full-blown Dianic witch who won’t work on the full moon, and instead of an out-of-office email sends clients a delicately-wrapped vial of my menstrual blood. But accepting the needs of a bleeding body and using those as guidelines for what and how to prioritise has improved my work life in the long run.
(*I’m close.)
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