Power In The Period

I’d never really thought that much about the actual process of “becoming a woman.” I was more excited to leave behind elementary school and enter middle school, to be considered someone who was growing older, more intelligent, and more mature. That was a big thing for me: maturity and being seen as mature in the eyes of my mother.

I knew about periods. Knew that one day it would happen to me and then magically my breasts would start to grow. I’d seen it happen to my older sister, whose breasts weren’t very big – neither were my mothers – but instead pretty average, so it didn’t really bother me. I didn’t know when it would happen, and I didn’t really wait on bated breath.

Cut to the beginning of sixth grade when I befriended this insanely beautiful, “popular” girl and her posse. Why she chose to be my friend, I have no clue. I was a geeky, awkward, skinny girl clueless about what to wear and how to interact with boys, and it never bothered me until I started realizing these features in myself by hanging out with them. I started getting the feeling she befriended me because she saw me as this charity project for her to take on and transform into something she deemed beautiful, that maybe she felt a sense of power in trying to control me as if I were her Barbie doll. With the countless sleepovers where she and our group would make me over with eyeliner and mascara, telling me “Charlotte, you look sooooooo beautiful with makeup on!” and always telling me what clothes I needed to wear – Lacoste and Abercrombie, I mean really? – I started to get the hint that I was a follower, not a leader. I didn’t have any power or say.

But I had found my way in. T’ana, our “fearless” leader, hadn’t gotten her period yet. She was becoming concerned because she really wanted to develop her breasts – I mean, the girl had an image to uphold for the sake of her popularity. She would confide in me a lot about this, and after a while, it soon became a game between us of who would get their period first (and in our case, whose boobs would begin to grow first). Suddenly, the hope for my period to arrive became intense, a suspenseful competition, and I would come home everyday hoping to see a red stain on my underwear. We both agreed that whoever got their period first would call the other as a way to say “congratulations” when really it was a way to express bragging rights, and I bet she thought it would be her. Another way for her to express her power over me, just because she reached her femininity first. Well, on December 5, 2005 – yes, I still remember the date – when I was eleven years old, I came home from school and upon going into the bathroom and sitting on the toilet, I looked down into my underwear and shrieked with joy. I feel very odd admitting that now, especially how right afterwards I paraded around my house screaming to my family that I had reached this momentous occasion, but I finally felt like I had won at something against those girls, especially T'ana. I finally had some sort of power over her that she couldn't take away.

And you bet your ass the next thing I did was grab the telephone to dial her number.

Personal Writing is Important!

This chapter reminded me the very reasons why I love personal writing (especially the classes I’ve taken here, which include Personal Essay, Intro to Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction and this one). I had been so accustomed to academic writing that when I first took Intro to Creative my sophomore year, and we would freewrite everyday, I was surprised at the things I would pull out from inside of me. These simple prompts would pull up moments I thought I had long forgotten, even some painful ones, all in this way to “move [stories] from a narrative that skims the top of [an] experience to one that unearths it.” (161). While not all of my essays came from sad experiences in my life, I felt really drawn to writing about them when the time did come, because of one of the key points MacCurdy brings up which is that “we sense painful memories even if we cannot verbalize them,” (162) and in writing about these moments, we try to make sense of them. What was even more strange than the magnetic pull towards writing about them was how much relief would come after the fact of writing about them. They didn't make me any more depressed, especially in the moment of remembering the sad moments. Getting it out of me and on the page and writing about how it all had made me feel was indeed therapeutic.

I love the way MacCurdy sectioned her piece. When she was talking about how our brain operates with the limbic system and the amygdala and hippocampus, it really did remind me of Alice Brand’s piece about emotion in the brain. I thought the most compelling part was how she says to think of these moments in images, little snapshots in our mind. Or imagine holding a film camera trying to capture that moment, what was said, heard, touched, smelled? And how did you feel? “Speech which does not integrate concrete images and the emotions those images convey into the concepts that they can produce will not provide a healing function for the individual.” (167). Because that’s where most of the therapeutic nature comes from writing about these difficult, traumatic experiences, placing yourself back in that moment (into those images) and describing how it felt to be back there.

One of my questions for the class comes from MacCurdy’s statement about how traumatic memories leave a mental image in the limbic system – and in the amygdala – to which they are given emotional weight. What about some of those traumatic memories that people have repressed and simply cannot recall? What happens to those and where are they stored? Because I’ve heard of women who have blacked out and cannot remember the trauma of childbirth and how painful it was, does our mind shut off if something is ever too painful physically or mentally?