Periods if you don't know, now you know
Illustrated by Sara Moana (she/her)
This article is a summary of menstrual cycles from someone who is not a proffessional. Every uterus is different; if you need help or want to understand it properly see a professional.
Half of us get periods, and we all know it isn’t really spoken about it unless we’re around other uterus-owning folk. Men’s testosterone levels are spoken about day after day. Period talk is taboo, boy talk is expected.
But our menstrual cycles affect our lives, every single day, and means our hormone levels are constantly changing throughout the month.
Period talk tends to put the image of the white, culturally-appropriating, curly-haired, hippie lady who is against showering; or those folk who finger paint using their period blood. But when it comes to menstrual cycles, they are pretty onto it. (I don’t mean the blood art thing but if that’s your thing, you do you. I won’t be buying any pieces, thank you.)
See, we’re always in our cycle. We tend to think it affects us when we’re PMSing on our period, but it’s always changing. This means bursts of motivation followed by days of no energy; or flirty confidence to rage the next. I think we can all feel a little crazy about it sometimes but we’re not that unstable, we just have a uterus.
We generally get our periods roughly once a month, though everyone varies. When you think about it, it’s oddly convenient that our bodies sync up with a man-made way of organising time – months exist because we say they do. That’s because calendars aren’t MAN made but woman made. The first ever calendar was made by a woman tracking her cycle to understand the fluctuations. This is literally why we organise time in months - our menstrual cycles determine what our hormone levels are, hence how we feel, hence some historical legend mapped out lunar calendar.
While in history this was significant, particularly in non-patriarchal cultures, we’ve forgotten this. But there’s a movement to understand and talk about them more, and there’s a fucking good reason for this.
So here’s the basic gist of the menstrual cycle, but please bare in mind the time frames and how they affect you is different for everyone.
Menstruation: The bloody beginning
This is the period; your cycle begins the day you start bleeding. This is the typical low energy state. This is where overall our hormone levels are low. This makes us feel flat, tired, moody, unmotivated - like our moods are shifting at a hundred miles a minute. Pretty basic, if you have a uterus you know the life and probably haven’t even needed to finish this paragraph.
Follicular phase: Vibe city
This phase is probably the trickiest, and definitely the least known one. It sometimes goes by the ‘preovulatory phase’. Shockingly, this is the phase before you ovulate.
It starts before your period ends, after the first couple of days (though some sources say it starts with your period, and others as it finishes). You might notice you feel great once you get your period sometimes. This is because here, we get a fun lil hormonal friend called the ‘follicle-stimulating hormone’. Essentially your uterus is forming ‘follicles’ which are like little pockets or bubbles that hold a few eggs, as they mature, the strongest one survives. Here we feel more inspired, happy, and motivated. But, like with most things in life, stress and illness will play big a factor in how much of that change we notice. While there’s a whole hell of a lot more to this weird little bubble in time, this is a basic ass run down.
Ovulatory Phase: Slay the day away
Back to something a bit more familiar, it’s breeding time, baby! This is a great phase! This marks halfway through our cycle, and as you probably know it’s when you’re most fertile. It’s when our eggs are shipped off from the ovaries to the fallopian tubes. This is our sexual prime, our bodies want to go out and find a mate to reproduce. We’re excited, high energy, more social and open to new experiences. This is the flirty, confident bad bitch version of yourself who comes to visit. It’s great, but it’s also why sometimes we can feel unstable, going from one extreme to the other in the span of two weeks: every single month. But this is why recognising these patterns is important, instead of dipping as we go into the next phase and think ‘what happened to that girl from last week’? We just need to adapt our lifestyles to our hormones and know those hormones are coming back.
Luteal Phase: Fuck this shit
PMS! The most exciting part of our cycle (yeah, nah), where we go from our emotional height to what for a lot of us is is the lowest of our cycle. Here our bodies are thickening the walls of our uterus to prepare it for a little tiny embryo (what science calls the foetus before the eighth week). The hormone released in this stage: progesterone, increases your bodies capacity to create the stress hormone (called cortisol). What this means is that if you’re already stressed, struggling mentally, or just tend to be a really busy person, you’re far more likely to be impacted by these hormones. As boring as it is, the best way we can fight it is the whole cheesy ‘taking care of our body’ thing. Taking things slow, skipping booze for the week, a healthy amount of sleep, and eating healthy and fulfilling meals all help. Getting ahead or knowing what you need to get done when you’ll be PMSing before you start (while you're peaking during ovulation) is another way you can help offset cortisol levels. If you manage and understand it’s your body and not brain making these emotional changes, they genuinely do feel less intense.
These cycles really aren’t a bad thing. Yeah, it can feel like we’re unstable but the only reason they suck so much is because is we really live in a man’s world. But it’s just a system, and really only an issue under capitalism where consistent weekly routines are expected of us. Men’s natural bodies are used as an excuse for just about anything but it’s never a good enough excuse when it’s a woman. Unfortunately, science hasn’t yet uncovered a lot about women’s health (the entire vagina was only fully mapped out in the 2000s). But we are learning more and more each day, and we’ve gotten to a point where universities are woman dominated. Interest in menstrual cycles is still growing, and hopefully we’ll get to a point where we all understand our different phases, how we’re affected by them, and slowly adapt our habits to match it.