Why getting your period in Cambridge is hell

We’ve all been there: you wake up, and your friends seem more annoying than usual.

You cry over little things like running out of milk. You wonder why everything seems so inexplicably shit, until you go to the bathroom and realise… it’s a red alert. Your vagina is thinking for you now, and she’s a heartless bitch.

Well, half of you won’t have been there, but read on anyway. You might learn something. Yes, I know, periods are gross and this might be a bit TMI, but after dealing with the taboo of bashing Tories and Christmas, I figured I have a certain standard of stigma to uphold.

You see, the problem with surfing the crimson wave in Cambridge is that during these short eight week terms, there simply isn’t time for me to spend two of those weeks moping around, feeling crap. It really cramps my style.

It certainly doesn’t help in an English degree. Whenever the painters are in I’ll bewilder my supervisor by being aggressively critical about any poems we read. Why doesn’t it just have a consistent rhyme scheme? Why is the poet trying to be so edgy? Who the fuck do they think they are, defying the rules of the English canon? And no, I’m NOT ovary-acting.

“I’m so hip, sometimes I don’t even write in iambic pentameter.” “We get it Shakespeare, you vape”

That anger is unavoidable when your oven’s in cleaning mode. My menstrual madness once started a serious argument with my DoS over tea. He didn’t have any milk to offer, I obstinately claimed his milk-less lifestyle was “blasphemous” and “objectively wrong”, and now whenever he offers tea I have to refuse it in order to maintain the facade of feeling passionate about milk. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me.

Then, of course, there’s the crying. When Niagara’s falling, some of us are capable of just going with the flow, and spending time with friends. Unless of course your past is resurrected like a repressed, unholy Jesus by something like an old song. That’s when the Red Sea parts, and a tide of emotion sends you back to your bed to cry into your pillow till 4am, whilst you listen to the song on repeat. I thought HE was supposed to bleed for my sins, not me?

(Not speaking from experience of course. But if I were, it might’ve been the Downton Abbey theme playing. It made me homesick and it wasn’t the only period drama on that night.)

At a silent disco before the Lion King played, and the childhood trauma of Mufasa’s death resurfaced

Cambridge’s clubs aren’t any good for drowning your sorrows, either. At 2am you’re bound to find yourself dancing to All Star for the third time that week whilst a fog machine is blasting right up your ass, and the bus of sobriety will suddenly hit you. This is bad enough on a normal day, but with the added depression of Aunt Flo’s visit, that bus is bound to Regina George you. Hard.

And that’s bloody annoying.

Real life image capturing the exact moment I was Regina George’d

Don’t get the wrong idea though: this isn’t a diatribe about how unreasonable people on their periods are. When you’re on your period, you’ll take no shit, and a woman or transperson standing up for themselves should never be stigmatised.

So to anyone on their period, remember you are beautiful, smart, loved, and ridiculously strong. Your womb is tearing itself apart, you’re bleeding internally, and yet you’re just going about your day like it’s no big deal. Homer couldn’t write a stronger hero than you.