44 days without T

     Hello! I am now 40 something days without T. I think I should start just writing dates in posts because I'm losing the count of how many T-less days I am. I have the day my last shot should've been in my calendar, so maybe I could start commemorating my no-T-niversary.

    Day 20 I got my period, which was something like 23 days after my last period attempt. I say attempt because day 26 last month, 2 or so weeks after my supposed T shot day, I got a tiny brown smidge on my pants that I thought would've been my period, but it didnt get much bigger than that and the day after the last droplets were droped. I believed my uterus probably was still too atrophied to work 100%, which probably was the case. My cycle is of ~21 days, so I just wrote down my next possible period date on my calendar based on that, and it was kinda right.

    I thought it'd be something you know, kinda minor. It seems however that my uterus is already back at its default capacity, if not at an increased capacity even. I had cramps and I bled so much I had to swap my cup every 2 hours. Maybe its compensating something for all those periodless years.

    Back in my last attempt to stop T i bought a small menstrual cup,  thinking it'd probably be a good idea to use something small since you know, vaginal atrophy and all. Now I finally got to test it and it wasn't a very good idea. Its too small for me so it was filling and leaking constantly, I felt as if the thing could do a 360 spin inside my pussy. While the atrophy situation is slowly going away, I ended up getting very sore down there. I tried swapping to tampons, and while it kept stuff in there I got even more sore after, it was actually a bit painful, so I gave up on internal methods and swapped to the gruesome and classic pad. Maybe this works as a piece of advice to not use internal menstrual protection methods in the first month after stopping T, though knowing how bodies are all different odds are you may be able to use them and be fine.

    My favourite menstrual device are cups, I never mananged to ace how to place them, honestly. I always get some droplets of leak that I counter with those tiny daily use pads or through not giving a shit. Usually I'd swap them twice or thrice a day, sleeping with them is very comfortable. I don't like wearing them in long travels though, I feel like if I were to notice a leak i'd not be able to fix things while in a bus or a plane. I also don't wear tampons in planes because I feel like the change in atmospheric pressure would vaccum those inside my pussy and bullet pierce them through my body, which is completely antiscientific bullshit. My plane flights are often very long and its not ideal to sleep with a tampon. I wanna give a try to those discs since they don't require casting the correct vaccum spell to fit, though I gotta confess I'm a bit intimidated at the sheer girth of those boys.

You can use this to wash a child.

    I should probably have talked about this earlier on, but having periods was never a dysphoric experience for me. Somewhere around half of the world population has periods, and I'm included in that group. There is nothing else to get about that.

    As much as society makes it so close to every mention of periods is immediately tied to femininity, vulnerability and womanhood, I don't really partake in that view. It is just a body function. Buying products without those associations is close to impossible though. My tampons have more venus symbols in them than any information on how long they should be kept inside, and shopping for a cup made me see thousands of womanhood care free the girl lady moment intimate only for you ads as there can be. Through the power of not giving a shit about what advertisers think the target group is, you can aechieve many good products, at the cost of some casual eye rolls. I mean, some of those things are straight up cringe. Even if I was a woman i'd be rolling my eyes at that. Its a thing to put inside my pussy for fucks sake. Also, why is there so much purple in those things? Everything is either pink or purple. Maybe CEOs think that pink is too much of an obvious girl colour, and purple is still feminine without being an actual man colour, like navy blue, so girls can wear purple products without the risk of actually becoming male. I think I saw an yellow menstrual product once in like, germany. My favourite cheap pad brand used to make leopard print packages, now its a boring pink purple venus symbol generic design. Another big loss for creativity.

     Getting my period again was actually a positive experience. I was happy to get them. For me it meant that my body functions are slowly returning to what it was before testosterone, which means using hormones for so long didn't affect anything in me negatively, its a sign of health from my body. 

    I see periods as my self care week, a time of the month in which I gotta take it easier. I allow myself to rest more, get nice treats, and overall take more care of my body. So this monthly ordeal is positive to me, in a way I even missed it. I often have very long periods (5-7 days of bleeding followed by a couple days of brown gunk) and my cycle is short (~21 days). I have some cramps but it isn't the worst thing out there, often boob pain and other symptoms like lethargy and infinite horny are more impacting. So I just take care of me during that time. I don't think its possible to be nice to yourself everytime something happens and end up associating that happening with a bad thing. Pavlovian response positive reinforcement type shit.

    Some people out there, cis or trans, see periods as a torture week. I'm not one of them, so I'm not gonna reinforce that idea. Get a menstrual cup, eat chocolate, wear something comfortable and allow yourself to nap through the day. Keep doing nice things to you during that moment and eventually as those conditions happen again you'll start to antecipate those good things you can do rather than the negative side effects of it.