It started with a plot problem. I needed my protagonist to run into another character at her school and for them both to be somewhere they wouldn’t normally be. I landed on the school sickbay as the setting and decided that my protagonist, Maggie, had arrived there because of period pain and dizziness (mostly because I didn’t want her to get a serious injury or feel nauseous).

All I had intended in writing the scene was for two characters to collide. I was glad I had incidentally included the experience of period pain on the page because I had never read a story where periods are treated as a normal and natural occurrence. I had never read a story where periods appeared as something other than a coming-of-age experience or the first steps into “womanhood”. I had never, I realised, read a description of periods that wasn’t about a character’s very first period.

At school, it infuriated me that boys could make as many jokes as they liked about the size of their dicks – even in the context of a classroom, and even when they knew they were making others uncomfortable – but I was judged for openly carrying a pad to the bathroom or mentioning that I was having a painful day of cramps and dizziness. I hate that my period pain was questioned and doubted.  

So I wrote the scene and moved on. I didn’t think much more about it.

But when I shared this excerpt in my Young Adult Fiction class, the response took me by complete surprise. Some of my classmates said it was refreshing, almost a relief, to read such honest descriptions and discussion of periods on the page, especially in YA. Others hadn’t realised until we discussed it in workshopping that many people who menstruate experience incredibly painful cramps like mine and my protagonist’s. There were stories from some of the non-menstruators in the room about how little they knew about menstruation, and how they had had to ask friends and girlfriends to explain periods to them. There were anecdotes about non-menstruators who had received the same sex ed as me holding completely nonsensical ideas about what a period was and how it worked. There were stories about menstruators who were never shown how to use a pad and they had to figure it out for themselves.

As I draft, I keep coming back to that wonderful Joan Didion quote: ‘I don’t know what I think until I write it down.’ I didn’t know until I wrote that scene that this was an area where I have something to say. That this is something I can advocate for.

I’ve changed my whole book to focus more on menstruation. I’m putting this experience back into the narrative. I’m writing it to make it real again, to put it out into the open where we can talk about it freely and without shame or embarrassment. I hope that someday, reading this story will help someone continue these conversations. I’ve made it the radical act of this story to make discussing menstruation so normal that radical action is no longer needed.

Because no writer should be scared to explore something that happens to them every single month.