i hate the pain that comes with being a woman

i have always done my best to avoid it

James McNeill Whistler

When I was younger, I would hear of young girls and women who didn’t get periods for whatever reason, and I would be secretly wishing that would be me.

Something is humiliating about negotiating so many pharmacological tricks just to avoid what everyone else around keeps insisting is “just a part of life.” It leaves you with a certain knowledge, heavy and bitter on the tongue: that the pain is not the only cost. There is the exhausting of constantly justifying why you don’t want to hurt. There is the condescension of doctors who ask if you’re sure you won’t “change your mind,” if you’ve thought about how some hypothetical man might feel about you having an empty womb. As if my life were an endless audition for a husband I have not met. As if my pain should be endured because someone else’s dreams might someday need the real estate of my body. Must I really wait for menopause to be free? If men were the ones who got pregnant, if men were the ones who bled and birthed and bore tiny, screaming bodies, it would be different. It would not be brushed aside, minimised, or considered taboo. There would be emergency innovation, moonshot projects, and Silicon Valley funding. There would be entire branches of medical science named after it. Instead, we have more research on male pattern baldness than endometriosis.

It is exhausting how women are expected to be soldiers and nurses at the same time, carrying the burden of both fighting and healing in a world that barely notices the toll it takes. We are expected to wake up each morning and wage war against our own bodies, against cramps that slice through us, against exhausting that clings like a second skin, against the invisible but constant ache that is treated as ordinary while showing up for everyone else with a smile, with open arms, with endless patience. We are required to stitch up other people’s wounds even as our own bodies hemorrhage silently beneath our clothes, and when we inevitably falter, when we break under the weight of carrying more than anyone should have to, we are scolded for not being stronger, for not perseverancing for not being more “resilient,” as if resilience were some medal we should be proud to wear around our necks while we collapse.

Pain becomes a job description no one admist exists, a condition of womanhood that we are expected to accept without protest, and when we finally say, “this is too much,” we are treated not with care but with disappointment, as if we have abandoned some sacred duty we never even volunteered for. I hate that we are taught to believe that our endurance is our virtue and our suffering is proof of worth. Pain is romanticised as character-building instead of being recognised for the crisis it is, leaving women to rot inside a story that praises quiet martyrs and punishes anyone who dares scream. Women are taught to survive first and to live second, but I want something more radical than survival. I want freedom: freedom from the drowning pain and suffering.

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“Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here inside.” — Phoebe Waller-Bridge