From puberty, most books, parents, and teachers prepare us to expect cramps, clots, heavy bleeding, and cycle irregularities as our womanly initiation. The messaging that “normal is whatever is normal for you” has left many of us doubled over in pain, passing out, and debilitated by our time of the month. We are taught to medicate our pain from early on, and particularly challenging periods are often met with another prescription—birth control—though used for non-contraceptive reasons. But what if we saw period pain as any other type of pain—a red flag, a warning, a call for attention? What if we treated heavy period bleeding with the urgency of a hemorrhage? How would we feel about our periods if we saw them as an indicator of our health instead of a nuisance to it?
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