If there was one thing I could say for my period, it was regular.
The years that I was trying to conceive, I never had to contend with the fluttering hope of a late period, only to be crushed with more devastation later on. It always arrived on time like the Grim Reaper.
Now I’ve gone off testosterone and let my cycle come back, although I still don’t fully know why. Not in order to conceive. Not in order to attain any particular kind of goal, except perhaps to have a different experience of being in my body, one in which my body marks time for itself. One in which time isn’t linear.
Here in Valatie, where I do freelance work from home and rarely socialize, I don’t need to pretend I don’t have a period. I don’t need to go in public and act like I’m not cramping, or discreetly palm a menstrual product and head for the men’s room. I realized that all the functions of my period I disliked were actually because I had to go in public and pretend I wasn’t having a period at all. Everything about my personal period experience would be perfect, I thought, if I could only retire to bed with a hot water bottle and a book, and not go out for several days.
This moment of my life as an underemployed freelancer seemed like the perfect opportunity to lean into this, so I blocked my calendar for the first three days of my period, a little gift to myself. What if I could give myself the gift of a real pause? What if I could live my personal period dream and retire to bed with a book, a cup of tea, and a hot water bottle, and not emerge for days?
I was so excited to have had this idea. I ordered myself a special book to read during my period. I was so proud to have affirmed myself in this way.
The day rolled around. I slipped into my period underwear in anticipation.
It didn’t come.
It didn’t come the first day I’d blocked.
It didn’t come the second day I’d blocked.
It didn’t come the third day I’d blocked.
I felt unmoored in time.
I usually know where I am in my menstrual cycle, because my body tells me. It feels different, it makes different mucus.
In these extra days, I didn’t know where I was.
I knew one thing, which is that I couldn’t possibly be pregnant, but that made the rest of it even more mysterious.
Because my body had told me it was coming. The day I was expecting it, the flesh of my chest hurt, and I felt porous and weepy, like my emotions were blowing through me like wind through an abandoned house. I resist the cultural language of “PMS” that we use for this experience, although I’m still feeling my way into the language that feels right for me—leaving it, right now, as one of many embodied experiences as a trans man that I have no language for.
But this is how I felt, and I knew my period was coming. I just knew.
And then it didn’t.
I was reminded of the first time I was trying to conceive, back when it was still easy to hope. A week after we tried, before a test result would be accurate, I realized that I knew I was pregnant, I just knew. I’d never felt quite this way before—tingly, electric. I was pregnant, I could just feel it. My body was telling me.
I wasn’t.
What crushed me more than not being pregnant was how sure I was, how wrong I’d been. How I couldn’t trust my body’s signals anymore. Then, too, I felt unmoored.
The one thing I could always say for my period is that it was regular. Until now.
What have I been clinging to all this time, in taking satisfaction in my period’s regularity, in that I always knew when it was coming? Do I find satisfaction in predictability, in—dare I say—control? Have I secretly thought, all these years, that it was better to have a predictable cycle, perhaps because of its sense of greater simplicity? Because of the ease in which I can slot it into calendars, block out time, make plans?
Here in Valatie, the temperature was up this week — in the 40s, 50s, even 60s. The snow melted. “Is it getting to be spring now?” I asked a neighbor. He said it would get cold again, but you never know when. By the end of the week, it snowed and went back into single digits. My period came, just as my datebook had me wrapping up my period of seclusion, coming back into the world.
In my professional life, I’ve been asked to work on a talk about evaluation. “A very basic talk,” I was instructed. I used to teach research methods to hospital chaplains. They were usually resistant at first. “You can lie with data,” they told me, which I always agreed with. Then I’d put up my “Ways of Knowing” slide—and we’d talk about how data (numerical and otherwise) was one way of knowing, and how there were many others—through intuition, through logic, through being told by a trusted person—and how each of these ways had its own unique flavor, its own particular benefits and challenges.
But this morning, I find myself wondering about valuing knowing over not-knowing. I can’t deny that I’ve felt a level of satisfaction for years in always knowing when my period was coming, but now I find myself wondering why. Is knowing a replacement for trusting that I will be able to handle things as they come? I’ll admit, too, that the pleasure of knowing when my period is coming has been replaced with a strange new pleasure at this fresh wildness of my body, this wrench in my datebook’s formerly tidy menstrual calendar.
I’m grateful to sink back, even more deeply, into the wilds of my body, and to see what else—beyond knowing, perhaps beyond language—it has to offer.
