A Steady Alliance

To my faithful friend who hasn’t left me…

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I was reading a blog post by someone who was discussing how their period has come and gone over the years. I know many women who go on and off with their menstrual cycle throughout their lives. Stories where the body has burnt out for a season, where trauma or athletics has taken a front seat or where the body has shielded itself to feel safe. It’s a real thing. These stories break my heart. People close to me hold these stories.

As you get older, you read about how stress cuts down your fertility. Stress kills. I was talking about this with a close friend, and they said something (in humor) along the lines of, “Your body may be immune to stress given everything that has happened since you were a kid.”

It dawned on me the other day that I have lived through a lot of stress, but my period has always been faithful in its arrival. In fact, if I described events in my life, a doctor could easily explain away why my cycle was missing if it ever was. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Life has been filled with insane f*ckery.

As I was reflecting on this, I was filled with gratitude. I know that others aren’t so lucky in this area (but they are in others). My body has been insanely resilient and steady. Through everything, it has bled every single month like clockwork through every up and every down since it’s first arrival. With its normal shifts and sometimes imbalances (the heavy bleeds), but it has never left me. For now, until I enter some other later phase, our alliance is sealed in blood.

I was filled with gratitude for that accompaniment. Sometimes, we treat these bodily rhythms as if they are inconvenient, but they are a gift. Imagine if we educated young women to value their rhythms. To see them as signs of something greater. To listen. To heal. It made me think of all the things our bodies do without question— stuff we don’t often think about, but stuff that we would notice and worry about if it were missing.

What body rhythm are you grateful for? What has been steady through the ups and downs (even if imperfect)? What has survived the storm with you?