Menstrual Warrior Creatives
In 2013 an idea popped into my head while I was changing my tampon, but it had occurred to me that I couldn’t just talk to anyone about this idea. 8 years ago, we didn’t talk about menstruation as freely as we do today, and that is really saying something if you are as old as I am (38). Now that we can, my idea was, if stem cells come from embryos and embryos are formed from menstrual blood than why had no scientist realized … ahh duh … there are stem cells in menstrual blood!
It dawned on me that we weren’t allowed to freely speak about menstrual blood, not even to our own mothers. The topic was so stigmatized people would hide their tampons up their sleeves on the way to the bathroom. So, how was I going to just pop off with my anecdotal scientific hypothesis? I couldn’t and every time I tried to I was met with disgust.
I decided that we have to destigmatize menstruation before anything else can happen. I went back to my own roots of menstruation humiliation, 7th grade. Thank the goddess grunge was popular at the time, no one questioned why my flannel was tied around my waist. Maybe they knew, maybe they saw, maybe they pointed and laughed at me or maybe that was all in my head. What was for real was the disappointment and anger that my mother displayed to me when she found the pants I had ruined. That made me angry, it still does sometimes.
I’m a writer and therapist by nature, I believe that there is the story you tell yourself and then there is the story you create for yourself to heal. I wrote down some truth to that story and I also wrote down how it could have been better and in some cases worse. I created two characters to help me get through this humiliating experience. I believe no terrible thing happens without some giant wonderful thing happening in the end, because that’s what hope looks like to me, terrible scenarios wrapped up in cosmic lessons for a bigger audience. There was so much I was learning about menstruation, during this journey. I switched to sustainable menstrual products. I started a Facebook group for people to share information and speak freely about menstruation, called Free Flow. I started matching my workouts to flow with my menstrual cycle. I dreamed up ways we could collect those stem cells and help people heal disease. I realized I was trying to make a new reality, and that proved to be very hard, so I wrote Luna & Flow to create that reality that others could see it too.
Luna & Flow take you on my journey of how I saw the cosmos changing the way we think and talk about menstruation. I started writing Luna & Flow back in 2015, since then there have been discoveries of stem cells in menstrual blood and medical journals have written about it, people have written books about menstruation, people have created legislation to end menstrual inequity, people have started nonprofits to end period poverty. These people are my heroes. Luna & Flow is dedicated to them, all of them.
