Community Share: Eunique’s Period Truth
[Originally shared March 16, 2020]
This is the first time I’ve ever had a guest blogger on Being Better, and I’m so proud to offer you a different lens to look through. Someone else’s lens.
Beings, meet Eunique Deeann - artist, writer, photographer and storyteller for people and brands. It’s been an honor working with her on many collaborations, including many of the photographs I use on this website and social, as well as artistic and personal endeavors such as teen and adult Empowerment Experiences, Pass the Cup/Cup for Cup Campaign, and Bodies. You can check out on Euni’s website Not Without Dirt [Edited: now Self Study] for more of her beautiful work. But without further ado, here are her words.
A big part of my period story has come tied to pain. Not only my own, but the pains, stories of them, and the harshness of what we’re told makes us feminine, female, powerful in this, ripped away from so many women with whom I share blood.
The women that I know of on my mother’s side of the family all had early hysterectomies. My mother, my grandmother + my grandmother’s sister, all before they turned 35.
And here I am, counting down the days till I turn the calendar on another year and greet 36, somehow seeming to have bypassed this familial curse the other females had endured. Currently, I straddle a fence of fear and freedom - feeling empowered and isolated all the same as my path seems to hold a newness that I never knew before to be a truth.
I have spent the last two years diligently working to break the mold and recreated this hereditary misfortune through the story called my own.
I believe that the connection a human holds with their mother, the one who gave them birth, is a special one that designs how they are shaped, how they show up, and how they transform their journey through childhood into adulthood and if that is their path, into parenthood when the time comes. The bond a mother and daughter hold is sacred and one that often is hard to find the right words to fully describe it.
I have always envisioned this as something that was warm and mushy. As something that was special in the way that made you feel abundant and on top of the world. I continue to work through my own challenges of the absences of my birth mother throughout my life and the manipulation and abuse that came when she was present. Nonetheless, I still hold just as strongly to the thought that this type of relationship is special. No matter if it’s filled with rainbows or rainclouds, there is a bond transferred from the womb into the cells of another that they will continue to hold.
My period truth expands beyond the roots of my menstrual cycle, although this is where I have come to in order to heal the misalignments that life has unfolded for me in a number of ways. For me, I’ve discovered that all things lead back to this broken connection that I have with my birth mother as she holds the first place I ever knew to be home. And without knowing what exactly I was doing or not doing, I spent my life mirroring the chaos that I learned here, with her.
Abandoning myself. Abusing the container that I came to know as my body. Feeling the same uneasiness with the attempt to settle into it and make it feel safe, like home. So instead, I overused it. Abused it. Misused it.
I’ve ignored the outcries from every part of me. I have numbed the pains. I “fixed” what was broken with bandaids of antibiotics and medically prescribed “healers” of ailments that I could not find the words for to give them names.
I spent my entire twenties lost, confused, hurting. Aching - in my head, my heart, my body, and my soul. At the turn of my thirties, I knew I could no longer go on like this if I was going to continue to live.
I have suffered from mood swings, anxiety attacks, crippling cramps, migraines that brought tears to my eyes and that could pin me to my bed for an entire day. I had chronic IBS, bloating, and cramps not connected to my uterus. I had fibroids, polyps and cysts that would burst and take me to my knees. Heavy bleeding that went on for days. Yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis - sometimes both at the same time. Sometimes for years back to back.
A long list of outcries from my body telling me that my internal system is out of whack. I ate mostly healthy and exercised moderately, sometimes more. I had since my mid-twenties. But it wasn’t until a little over a year ago that I really started diving in and focusing on connecting to my own body by listening to what was happening during and around my period - because this was when I felt my system was screaming loudest to me.
I started tracking my cycle and paying attention to what I was eating, my moods, my sleep and how the things outside of me affected the things happening inside of me. I started being honest about what was triggering things for me and started cutting things out a little at a time.
There has been no perfect recipe. And I don’t have a success story to share that reveals that I’m fixed or transformed. I am still doing the work. I’m still on my journey to healing the damages that my body carries. From me. From the women before me who’s cells I share. Whose stories and wounds I carry. From the toxins and traumas it has endured, the external belief systems that trigger fear, and the statements that make me feel as if there’s an incompetence that I have about this body of mine.
I am not healed, but I will say that I do feel better than I have in a long time.
Better than I can remember feeling in my adulthood. And more connected to, confident in, patient with, trusting of, and existing within this body of mine than I can remember I have ever felt.
Pain is still a part of me. But it no longer is allowed to transform me. I’m transforming it - through the actions I am taking led by listening to this body of mine. I believe as women, we are gifted with a system that is sensitive, that is strong. That is delicate and that is enduring. And we try this system, because this is likely what we have been told, or taught or shown in so many ways.
From our mothers, from society, from friends, from our partners. We are uneducated in school and through systems that lack accessibility, diversity and that are designed solely for the patriarchy. But the more I connect with my body, the more I believe that this sensitive, strong, delicate and enduring system is not something that makes us weak. It’s not something that should carry pain. The more I connect with my body and listen to what it wants, feel what it wants to release, and nourish it with good nutrition, rest, love, and patience, the more it proves to me that it is the ultimate healer.
I’m still walking my period truth journey. I’m defining this day by day. I don’t think this is something that comes as a single story, but rather it is linked by a lifetime of them. I believe our period truths began with our mothers. And ours was broken in way too many ways.
As part of my path, my connection, my healing, I am doing my work. I commit to exploring cycle syncing and regenerating my body through my endocrine system. Not only for my own life and longevity, but also because I believe by healing ourselves, we heal the others around us. Those tied to us. That have created us. And that will come after us.
This is all part of the cycles of life. And it’s my period truth to continue to hold the hands of those who molded me into the woman I am continuing to become, even from afar, so that collectively, we can become the best versions of our own selves.
I don’t know if there will ever be a day that I’ll see my mother’s face again. Or hear her voice speak kind words to me before she dies. I hold this grief inside my body. And it comes up often as pains in my reproductive system, challenges in my pelvic floor that root me and make me safe and at home.
But, I can’t control that. All I can do is continue to hold onto and nourish the belief that our connection will live on regardless of the closeness or the memories made. And in this, my commitment to continuing to find myself, to continue to heal myself and to continue to let go of the beliefs that life is rooted in pain.
I wrote this love letter to myself, to her. Maybe to you too, who might share a story or feeling or connection or disconnection similar to the one I carry. I hope that this, or something, will inspire you to find the courage to uncover your own period truth. And to transform your current beliefs into ones that aren't tied to fear or pain or lack of pleasure or safety or disconnection. Because you deserve that. We all do.
A letter to my mother.
Maybe it’s this fear of feeling nothing at all. Maybe it’s this fear of feeling all alone. A fear that if I let go of the pain then you’ll no longer be a part of me which means I’ll no longer be.
So I hold on. Continue to transform these emotions into new forms of toxins that are slowly killing me. Fuck. That’s all I’ve ever seen or known just the same. Never health or vitality. Never happiness that wasn’t chased with pain.
Your mouth smiled. Your eyes revealed that it was all a lie. Your words told stories that your body did not align.
So I learned how to walk a walk. And talk in ways that hid my confusions and shame. How to bare through every ounce of pain.
Believing that this was it. That this was my truth. Because for me this was the only way I could hold onto some piece of you.
But when the aching transformed from making me feel connected to you into isolating me from everything outside of you, I uncovered that I could no longer turn inward on myself, for the sake of you.
And this is when the space you held began to transform. From this open wound. Into a place that connected me to my body in a way that felt like the home I’ve never known.
And now all I long to do is to continue to heal. To find peace in the foreign feelings of my body. And a contentment in its transformations. Trust in its warnings. Love in its aging. And commitment in the continuation to do everything I can to use this vessel in better ways than I have before.
My connection to you no longer lies in my inability to feel good - in my ability to hold onto my pain. Instead my connection to you is shifting into my belief that all we share was passed on to me so I can too, even from afar, help heal you by helping heal my own self. And through this connection, empower our next generation, and those around me to do the same.
self portraits by euni