DAY 5

Morning Reports

Jan 5: Done

6:56 am with no alarm. BAM! Like clockwork.

I have a feeling I snored all night, I was exhausted and my nose was blocked. Baaaad combination. No complaints from neighbors.

I remember my dreams, probably because I was awake around 4–5 am and went back to bed. The following time frame is the most prolific one for lucid dreaming, so even without directing them they’re usually clearer and easy to remember. Closer to the surface I guess.

Enter shower, where my inquisitive brain starts to flex, and I wondered about periods in humans.

How much historical accounts do we have of menstruation? How far back are we able to trace it, both physiologically and socially?

At around 11, I was explained in school that I would become a blood machine, and I came back home wailing that I refused to grow up. It seemed horrific and enslaving at the time.

My mom reacted with a stoic “at least you know about it… no-one told me”.

So the baseline was being gathered like cattle in an amphitheatre to receive basic information and a couple of pads, and it was a recent social phenomenon.

Before that, countless generations of women were just blindsided with a fear of death as they suddenly started to bleed through the center of their bodies. That’s centuries of perpetual female shock as a transition to physical adulthood. 🤷‍♀️

I’m still at a loss with how profoundly disconnected society has been with the feminine side of existence.

I’m not blaming men specifically… I find it even more shocking that women complacently perpetuated this opacity regarding their experience of life.

I understand that there were taboos, little resources and blocked alleys. But the lack of understanding of their own stance in the world, the lack of curiosity, the lack of freedom in pursuing their own version of knowledge… I don’t know how much of that was self-inflicted.

But I digress.

Regarding periods, I wondered if our reproductive system had always functioned with the same rhythm. It would be highly vulnerable, for humans early in history, to bleed profusely during days when you are trying to protect a shelter. It must have been a cursed blessing to reach reproductive maturity.

I imagine it made humans easy to track down, particularly if they were on the move.

The most logical evolutionary adjustment would be for regular and long periods to be a more modern phenomenon, when humans as a species were able to safely settle.

But then again… I don’t know if any records of this exist… women have remained silent and guilty about their reproductive and sexual life for millennia.

It’d be interesting to know.

I got the title: “Bleeding Through Time: a history of human menstruation” 😆

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