To have a fuller analysis of bell hooks' work is to also name the circumstances that she worked within - and to respect that as much as we respect their words.
Jade T. Perry, newsletter
I've lost, of my bleeding years, an estimated 240 days to bleeding. I have been bleeding twenty years.
In my first job out of college, I once looked wane and achy in a meeting. "Something wrong?" my boss asked.
"Period. Headache. I can't see." The light felt like it cut the back of my eyes, into my brain like a razor and a punch.
He seemed a tad skeptical that it was not something to be that hindered by, how eager I was to leave and walk home. Exaggerating, perhaps? A sense that I was in fact exaggerating? That I complained but did not suffer what my words indicated?
No, I never exaggerated.
But perhaps I’ve exaggerated my lost days? Let's remove a few for the first 2-3 years while my bleeding found itself. Let's remove a few for the few years in my 20s that I took birth control that eliminated the bleed. Let's remove a few for pregnancy.
I'd put that new number, at 215 and that's with a generous assumption around the number of months where I didn't bleed.
For the majority of those, the vast majority, the majority of the majority, I have suffered.
Fatigue is too small a word for the way bones stop holding me up and my muscles go slack and I can't keep my eyelids above the midline. How I can go to bed and not get up for five or more hours. How no thoughts pass coherently from ear to ear. Just... sitting. I call this falling off the hormone cliff.
I can feel where each organ begins and ends, cramping along ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, vagina.
Disgust. I hate the feeling of clots coming out of me. The pelvic sag as my vagina tries to crawl out of me in slow motion.
Nutritional deficiencies. Bleeding this much every month puts me liable for anemia. Which I have. I can't remember any time in my bleeding life I've had enough iron to donate blood.
Management. Do I have enough pads? Have the reusable underwear been washed and dried? Advil. We need more advil. Always more advil. If I start bleeding this day, what will I need to cancel? What if I start this day? Will my Hormone Cliff happen on the first day of bleeding or the second? What if my cycle is longer or shorter than normal? Could I fly on that day? What if my husband is gone? Can I watch our kid effectively? If I am traveling, what if I overflow and stain someone's guest bedroom sheets?
Evaluation. Am I bleeding too much? Should I take advil to slow it down? Lots of clotting this time. What does that mean?
I calculate my life by this event. I make my plans. I sense my years. I measure my health or unhealth. I pack extra clothes. I tell people I can't hang out. I reschedule work meetings. I tell the PT that I'm sick.
My body is so tender that the gentlest touch feels like it bruises.
And yet, and yet, it was not till recently that I said I have a chronic condition.
An illness? No. It work appropriately. It is not labelled as endometriosis. It is not labelled as PCOS.
But it is a burden. A limitation. Chronic, ongoing, for all the years of my bleeding life. A limitation, an edge I can't work through, try harder.
Jade T. Perry wrote about reading bell hooks through a disability and chronic-illness lens in a recent newsletter.
bell hooks was chronically ill and this impacted her everyday life & work as an artist. hooks suffered (her words) from heavy bleeding during periods, chronic asthma, chronic nightmares, and chronic pain. And her family navigated the medical industrial complex by utilizing roots, herbs, and home remedies.
She writes in the third person, "They tried to strengthen her by making her eat, drink those drinks of milk and raw eggs. She never knew how much her mama worried that she was just not gonna make it. They did not have money to be running back and forth to the doctor so they tried home remedies made of honey fresh from the honeycomb, special teas, and herbs. But she suffered..."
Later in the book, she explains how her chronic illness intersects with both her life as a writer & educator who needed to travel to share work and as a partner to a cishetero, non-monogamous man. She writes, "I never want to travel for fear that I will be sick, that I will be bleeding heavily and soil everything. He [Mack, her partner] just says It's a drag living with somebody who is sick every month..."
What is the importance of this context? What does it give us as readers and / or as folks invested in Black feminism? To start, I believe that it gives us a fuller perspective on bell hooks the HUMAN, the Black femme who was left out of the medical complex & then had to navigate ableism in their own home. I think it gives me a deeper appreciation of the world that she was writing to us from - the world of the immunocompromised, the chronically pained, the chronically ill. To have a fuller analysis of bell hooks' work is to also name the circumstances that she worked within - and to respect that as much as we respect their words.
The longer I am outside of traditional work structures, the longer I wonder if I could even survive within them. And to see the value of bell hooks words… and to, as Jade puts it, “respect the context as much as we respect their words.” That feeling of becoming incapacitated for a work world I never much loved but alway imagined I was “good enough for” [see and hear the judgement about how quality is measured against money]… to know that I am, in probability, not.
Because work was not made for bleeding. Nor for the ways my body has slowly slumped out of key hormone production and responsiveness, the way my body has slid into constant illness.
I want to come around to honoring this bodyness of my life as much as I honor my work in language. It’s been the gap I try to move across. My body is always the conduit to knowledge, to meaning, to love and connection, to truth; the words come after—words wrap themselves around the feeling in the body. It is secondary where my body is first.
But I am sad. And, because of how the made up world of work has woven itself into my cells, I feel like a failure as often as I feel sad. This emotion is not mine exactly; I acquired it like a cold and it just happens regularly as if it were mine but it isn’t, it’s a foreign story living in a body that is doing what it can with what it has. And one of the things it has is a story that bodies that don’t cooperate are bad bodies. That it’s a sign of looseness, a failure of effort and containment. As if all bodies aren’t a mess of creatures and bacterias and shit and dissintegration. That’s it. That’s what we are.
But the great effort I’ve put into pretending otherwise. That we all have. How our work and writing stinks of the pretending. My work and writing stinks of denial instead of what it is, the screaming voice of physical life. Language is body. Always.
And the body bleeds.
concluding note: the above is not an invitation for medical evaluation or feedback (aka “Have you tried…”). This is me sharing personal feelings about an experience that affects many, if not most, menstruating people.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash