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Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nyamnyam-jjeopjjeop-my-life-away

Shit No One Told Me About My Period

rootfauna

I knew the basics before I got it, but I had no clue…

* The blood wouldn’t necessarily be red. When I first got my period, I spent a few min looking at my underwear wondering how I shit myself. I didn’t know the blood could look brown, or be thick.

* That tampons weren’t a good idea yet. I was 10 or 11 when I got my first period and physically smaller than an adult woman. My first attempt at inserting a tampon was very painful and unsuccessful. I wouldn’t use them until I was around 14 or so.

* That when you use pads the blood can get on your bottom and I’d have to occasionally clean off the toilet seat after using it.

* That getting your first period DOES NOT mean you’re fully developed and fully able to bear children. I could have technically gotten pregnant at that age, but I was still a child and pregnancy would have put my life in danger because I was still physically immature.

* That it wouldn’t be regular for another few years.

* That very painful cramping is NOT NORMAL once you reach your 20s and is cause for concern.

* That the blood and tissue you pass can look chunky or stringy and not like blood from a cut.

* That stress can halt your period for months BUT

* That doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant

Feel free to add your own

mskiarafan1

Relatable

angelsaxis

-passing blood clots is completely normal

-that your period may straight up skip a month when you first get it

-and then it’ll happen twice in the same month

-getting your period does NOT automatically make you a woman

martee-bee

Painful cramping isn’t normal in your 20’s? That’s a little concerning, mine have been getting exponentially worse

phinarei

It is NOT normal. 

I can 100% guarantee you have endometriosis, PCOS, or another hormone problem. If your doctor says it’s normal, DEMAND a second opinion. 

Thinking that it’s normal is how people end up infertile or dead. It’s why so many women under 40 these days are having an almost impossible time either conceiving or preventing conception. Because no one teaches anyone that it’s the sign of trouble that can very seriously hurt you. 

Anyone who has severe cramps, heavy bleeding, or irregular periods after about 19 years old should seek medical advice. None of those are normal. 

If you have skin tags, a hard time losing weight, migraines related to your period, depression that is amplified when menstruating, severe mood swings, sleep disturbances that get worse with menstruation, or any other significant health problem that started with puberty and is worse when hormones are fluctuating you need to be checked. 

None of the things that people relate to women on their periods is actually an example of a healthy woman. It’s an example of people who need one form of treatment or another. 

colt-kun

Do NOT go to a general doctor. Find a women’s health center. Obgyn doctors. ASK SPECIFICALLY FOR A FEMALE DOCTOR. (Also helps with creating a demand for female doctors, win-win)

And if the doctor you do see tried to write you off as “nothing” or “its normal”? Politely insist for another doctor. People forget: you are paying them for a service. If you believe the doctor is not taking you or your problems seriously, ASK FOR ANOTHER DOCTOR. Specifically, “Do you have another doctor on staff who is more experienced with female health”. It is WELL within your right to change doctors as you see fit - you owe no loyalty to one specific doctor if they aren’t meeting your needs.

master-yen-sid

Reblogging for all my followers with vaginas. I have so many sisters and friends with vaginas and I didn’t know most of this. I turn 30 soon. You’d think I’d have pick up these bits of information over the years in conversation.

luckystarchild

Hey!! Hey everybody with periods!!! If you have a period you should read this, because it’s helpful, and people with periods really aren’t taught enough about their own bodies.

daddys-chaton-noir

even if u personally don’t get a period, someone u know/care abt prob does & u should pass this along

women’s health is health & we should all know these things, i feel

whatsnew-lgbtq
hersheywrites: “ trappunzelll: “ imaginebackwards: “ keoooooooo: “ jatel0: “ For The...
jatel0

For The Masses:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec

http://textbooknova.com

http://en.bookfi.org/

http://www.gutenberg.org

http://ebookee.org

http://www.manybooks.net

http://www.giuciao.com

http://www.feedurbrain.com

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=380

http://www.alleng.ru/ 

http://www.eknigu.com/ 

http://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/

http://2020ok.com/

http://www.freebookspot.es/Default.aspx

http://www.freeetextbooks.com/

http://onebigtorrent.org/

http://www.downeu.me/ebook/

http://forums.mvgroup.org

http://theaudiobookbay.com/

More Here

keoooooooo

no one coulda reblogged this a month ago when i spent 500

imaginebackwards

momentsbymarcus

trappunzelll

Look at KB coming through

hersheywrites

Every time you see this, reblog it. There is always someone in college that will see this.

Source: thenamesjocelyn
legion-of-fandoms
marxvx

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

madgastronomer

Younger than 40.

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.

feminesque

2011

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.

radicalgendercoalition

They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.

That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.

Here’s the link to the digitization:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/

As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families.
I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis):
http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959

flashdoggy

I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y'all. Please, take care of one another.

injygo

http://www.aidsquilt.org/view-the-quilt/search-the-quilt

Updated link to the quilt

millenianthemums

this is so hard to read or even think about but… it’s so important. it’s so important to understand just the …overwhelming SCALE of this. how many people died while the government did NOTHING.

notlostonanadventure

Reblogging for pride

Never forget your fallen. Your people were nearly annihilated in an epidemic. Never forget how lucky we are, never forget how they tried to let us die.

misbegottenmoon
misbegottenmoon: “songs to save the world to: a taz balance playlist“misery fell (tally hall) | am i alive (team) | bury our friends (sleater-kinney) | the story of tonight (we the kings) | everybody (backstreet’s back) (backstreet boys) | things we...
misbegottenmoon

songs to save the world to: a taz balance playlist

misery fell (tally hall) | am i alive (team) | bury our friends (sleater-kinney) | the story of tonight (we the kings) | everybody (backstreet’s back) (backstreet boys) | things we lost in the fire (bastille) | rapture (sky-pony) | the boys are back in town (thin lizzy) | centuries (fall out boy) | how far we’ve come (matchbox twenty)

best enjoyed on the moon, played to a jellyfish by a sarcastic bard on the violin.

whatsnew-lgbtq
transguyghost

i dont care if u never listen to me ever again just let me be ur internet dad for just one second: dont start cutting yourselves please ever

transguyghost

ok im gonna reblog this again bc i want more ppl to see it?? ive compiled a (by no means complete) list of the things u can expect if u start:

- u cant stop. its a legitimate addiction. there is no ‘seeing what its like’. its soso hard to stop it and believe me, because that was me. i thought i would sate my curiosity but all i did was make my life miserable
- everything can become a trigger. someone carved things in a table?? trigger. u get a scratch by accident?? trigger. see something sharp?? yup. 
- the scars dont go away and if people see them (and no matter how hard you try, people will see them) they get this awful fucking look on their face like a mixture of disgust and horror and pity 
- u have to sit through people making shitty fucking jokes and calling people like you (real, struggling people like you) edgy emos looking for attention and it makes you feel sick but you have to sit there silently
- in fact, any conversation about self harm becomes thoroughly uncomfortable because they’ll talk about it like no one in the room has ever gone through it (or, if they know, they’ll glance at you out the corner of their eye when they think you cant see)
- any emotion can give you the urges- not just negative. ur body associates the happy feeling with the pain so ur brain is like ‘????? u cant have one without the other??’ 
- it can have been years. years. you can have stopped and got better and you’ll still feel the urge to hurt yourself and it makes you feel like you haven’t improved at all and you’re still fourteen and hating yourself
- (maybe this is just me) but some part of you misses it?? you stopped and you know its horrific but its so difficult to get rid of your blades or whatever you use because you feel so weirdly attached to these things that are so awful and you dont even know why 

god damn i just want yall to understand that you dont have to hurt yourself ever, okay?? just. don’t. trust me.

prismpom

I will reblog this every single day.

Source: sparklecorpse
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