Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.
This is just a wacky idea I had, but maybe it’s not a coincidence that, in a country where half the population’s normal reproductive functions are stigmatized, American uterus-and vagina-havers are still fighting tooth and nail to have those same reproductive systems fully covered by the health insurance that we pay for. Maybe periods wouldn’t be so frightening if we didn’t refer to them as “red tide” or “shark week” or any other euphemism that evokes neurotoxicity or dismemberment. Maybe if we didn’t perpetuate the idea that vaginas are disgusting garbage dumps, government officials wouldn’t think of vagina care as literally throwing money away. Maybe if girls felt free to talk about their periods in shouts instead of whispers, as loudly in mixed company as in libraries full of moms, boys wouldn’t grow up thinking that vaginas are disgusting and mysterious either. Maybe those parts would seem like things worth taking care of. Maybe women would go to the doctor more. Maybe fewer women would die of cervical and uterine cancer. Maybe everyone would have better sex. Maybe women would finally be considered fully formed human beings, instead of off-brand men with defective genitals.
Maybe I wouldn’t have had to grow up feeling like a strip of wax paper was the only “person” who understood me.
I don’t remember how I got over it. Just time, I guess. I just waited. Eventually I moved from pads to tampons, and eventually I moved from tampons with applicators to the kind of tampons that you just poke up there with your finger, and eventually I was able to ask a female friend for a tampon without dying inside, and eventually I was able to have a tampon fall out of my purse on a crowded bus and not construct an elaborate ruse to frame the woman next to me, and now I’m just a normal adult with a husband she’s not afraid to send to the store for o.b. super-pluses. Ta-daaaah.
The truth is, my discomfort with my period didn’t have anything to do with the thing itself (though, to any teenage girls reading this: yes, it is gross; yes, it hurts; no, it’s not the end of the world; yes, sometimes it gets on your pants; no, nobody will remember)—it was just part of the lifelong, pervasive alienation from my body that every woman absorbs to some extent. Your body is never yours. Your body is your enemy. Your body is gross. Your body is wrong. Your body is broken. Your body isn’t what men like. Your body is less important than a fetus. Your body should be “perfect” or it should be hidden.
Yeah, well, my name is Lindy West and I’m fat and I bleed out of my hole sometimes. My body is mine now. Kotex understands.
How to Stop Being Shy in Eighteen Easy Steps
Don’t trust anyone who promises you a new life. Pick-up artists, lifestyle gurus, pyramid-scheme face cream evangelists, Weight Watchers coaches: These people make their living off of your failures. If their products lived up to their promise, they’d be out of a job. That doesn’t make the self-help economy inherently sinister or their offerings wholly worthless—it doesn’t mean you can’t drop five pounds by eating Greek yogurt under the nurturing wing of a woman named Tanya, or lose your virginity thanks to the sage advice of an Uber driver in aviator goggles, or help your cousin’s sister-in-law earn her February bonus while adequately moisturizing your face for $24.99—we are all simply trying to get by, after all. It’s just that, sadly, there are no magic bullets.* Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible. It resists deconstruction.
Likewise, lives don’t actually have coherent, linear story arcs, but if I had to retroactively tease one essential narrative out of mine, it’d be my transformation from a terror-stricken mouse-person to an unflappable human vuvuzela. I wasn’t shy in a cute, normal way as a kid—I was a full-blown Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle plant-radishes-in-my-ears-and-leave-me-in-the-care-of-an-impudent-parrot situation. I was clinically shy. Once, in the first grade, I peed my pants in class because I was too scared to ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. When the class bully noticed the puddle between my feet, I pointed at a water pitcher on the other side of the room and whispered that it had spilled. Just in one small, discrete pool under my chair. And also on my sock. And also the pitcher was filled with urine for some reason. Public schools, am I right? (Pretty sure he bought it.)
Just a few decades later, here I am: the Ethel Merman of online fart disclosure. I now get yelled at and made fun of for a living—my two greatest fears rendered utterly toothless, and, even better, monetized. Women ask me: “How did you find your voice? How can I find mine?” and I desperately want to help, but the truth is, I don’t know. I used to hate myself; eventually, I didn’t anymore. I used to be shy; eventually, I made my living by talking too much.
Every human being is a wet, gassy katamari of triumphs, traumas, scars, coping mechanisms, parental baggage, weird stuff you saw on the Internet too young, pressure from your grandma to take over the bodega when what you really want to do is dance, and all the other fertilizer that makes a smear of DNA grow into a fully formed toxic avenger. Everyone is different, and advice is a game of chance. Why would what changed me change you? How do I know how I changed anyway? And how do you know when you’re finished, when you’re finally you? How do you clock that moment? Is a pupa a caterpillar or a butterfly?*
It’s flattering to believe that we transform ourselves through a set of personal tangibles: Steely resolve and the gentle forbearance of a mysterious young widow who wandered in off the moor, but reality is almost always more mundane. Necessity. Luck. Boredom. Exhaustion. Time. Willpower is real, but it needs the right conditions to thrive.
I can tell you my specifics, though. I can tell you the stepping-stones that I remember along the path from quiet to loud—the moments when I died inside, and then realized that I wasn’t actually dead, and then died inside a little bit less the next time, until now, when my wedding photo with the caption “FAT AS HELL” was on the motherfucking cover of a print newspaper in England (where Mr. Darcy could see it!!!!!!!!), and my only reaction was a self–high five.
Maybe, if you follow these steps to the letter, you’ll end up here too.
Step One: Shoplift One Bean
I was four years old, following my mother around the grocery store. She stopped near the bulk dry goods, and I stuck my hand deep into a bin of beans, cool and smooth. I thought the beans were cute—white with black freckles, like maybe you could plant one and grow a Dalmatian—and there were so many of them, one wouldn’t be missed. When we got home, I showed my mother my prize. To my surprise, she was mad at me. It’s just one bean, I said. It’s not stealing.
“What if everyone who came to the grocery store took ‘just one bean’? How many beans would the grocery store have left?”
This was an incomplete story problem. How many beans were in the bin? How many people go to the grocery store? How often do they restock the beans? I was going to need some more information.
Instead, she jumped straight to the answer: zero more beans. If everyone took just one bean, beans would go extinct and I would tell my grandchildren about the time I ate a Crunchwrap Supreme with the same hushed reverence my dad used when talking about riding the now-extinct Los Angeles Railway from Glendale all the way to Santa Monica. Oh my god, I realized. She was going to make me RETURN THE BEAN.
We drove (drove! wasted fossil fuels! we fight wars over those!) back to the store. The teenager mopping the meat section looked up at us.
“Can I help you?”
“My daughter has something she’d like to tell you.”
I proffered my Dalmatian egg, rigid with terror and barely audible. “I took this. I’m sorry.”