diary entry from the first day of my period

or, what men think all my writing is

I’ve been writing two or three pages longhand, first thing in the morning, for the better part of this year. I don’t re-read my pages until a month has passed and today I got my period and looked at this entry and thought, “yeah, she gets it.”

Here’s something I’m still figuring out: how to say that menstruation does not make people crazy while it very much makes ME and many people I know feel extremely crazy on a cycle that, while ostensibly predictable, catches us by surprise in new and insanely horrific ways every time.

Anyway. The morning pages thing has been good for many reasons, one of them being that I can look back at an entry like this and connect deeply with the state of mind. And also that, in two weeks, I can read it back and say “actually what are you on about"