Menstrual Products and My Misunderstood Childhood

I used to think I was so weird, but I had absolutely no context whatsoever to explain absolutely anything that I was experiencing. One of the things that I could never really wrap my head around was my fascination with menstrual products. My sister is about two and a half years older than me and while growing up we shared a bathroom. She was always upset because I took so long in the restroom and she could never understand what I was doing in there.

There were plenty of things that I was doing in that restroom that I didn’t really need anybody to know about. There of course was the usual restroom things that really don’t need explaining, as well as bathing and grooming of oneself. However, often I was in that restroom I was reading the instructions on my sisters various menstrual products. Of course at that time I had absolutely no use for any of those things, and I just could not understand what in the world I was doing, but I didn’t spend much time thinking all that much about it, I just sort of felt compelled to read it all and learn.

I don’t remember how often I would do it or what would prompt it, but I do know that I read the directions for every different menstrual product that she placed under her sink. I read from the top of that page down to the very bottom, flipping it over and repeating the exact same ritual. I would of course examine the pictures and ponder how exactly I could attempt to complete the instructions. I never tried, but I could always imagine. There was nothing more to it all than that. I would read the directions, consider how the products might be used on AFABs and how I might be able to use it given what I had going on down there.

When I felt as though I had to exit the restroom before arousing too much suspicions I would carefully fold the directions back up on the same lines and place it back in the exact spot in the container I retrieved it from. I would flush the toilet, acting as though that was what I had been doing, and I left the scene of the educational crime.

I left with knowledge, guilt, and a whopping thumping of dysphoria.

I had no idea that was what was going on. I really just thought I was a complete whacko. I thought there was something severely wrong with me. I knew for sure that I couldn’t tell anyone. I knew that nobody would understand me. I knew for sure that I would be in trouble, because I knew I was doing something wrong. I wasn’t doing the things I was supposed to be doing. That was how everything in my world was. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I wasn’t enough of the person that everybody was telling me that I was supposed to be.

The problem was that I, and nobody around me, had any idea of what being a transgender human is all about. What I was experiencing was totally normal, for a girl my age. I mean, not really, in that it was actually above and beyond for a girl my age to actually take a product’s enclosed pamphlet and actually read the entire thing over and over again until they actually understood it, without the help of a single other person. Yeah, that’s actually on the A+ scale of living. However, because I was AMAB, all I could ever think was how broken I was.

These sorts of things had an absolutely horrifying effect on me and my growing self. It made me see myself as a bad person. It made me think of myself as something that I am not. Simply because of this interesting human condition where my brain is expecting everything that the brains of typical females expect, and yet I am actually receiving none of that in my real life. It doesn’t matter what I am receiving nor what I am being told, my brain keeps wanting and expecting to be able to experience everything that typical female experience.

I am waiting for these things to happen, I am dying for these to happen, and no matter what I do, they never come, they never happen. Until now. Now I can see my body finally doing what my brain has expected my body to do for my entire life. Now I can feel myself being freed from the grips of the pain, the misunderstandings, the wrongs. Finally my body is beginning to feel like me, and my brain feels like it is finally getting home.

These are the things that I find myself pondering these days. I am trying to take the time to truly learn about myself. To slow down, dissect my life under this new understanding, this new lense of who I have been my entire life. I was never that weirdo that I saw myself as. I was always an outgoing, hard working, self determined girl, willing to do whatever she can to make her life all that it can be.

Love you

Make your life all that it can be.