Typescript · 12.02.26This all began with a dinner last year that I candidly named ‘Period Party’. A celebration of my first period after a half-lifetime on contraceptives to prevent the spread of my Endometriosis. Such remedies are falsely presented as ‘remedial’ and after a surgery earlier that same year that had proved their redundancy, I decided it was time to put an end to artificial hormones. Following my first bleed — which felt like a grand leap back into womanhood — I decided to frivolously celebrate the natural, considered it a do-over, a metaphorical first, to celebrate all those that had come before and would now come again. What has come since has grown into a motif that reveals more to me with each iteration. Red and white as central pillars. Themes of folklore and femininity, of allowing dream-worlds to overlap and conflate the ‘real’. It seems to me now that I am trying to evoke a long forgotten impression. That of a very young girl, embracing her first period in the middle of an ancient forest, hunting rabbits and carving wood, on the kind of school trip younger generations have missed as regulations get tighter and the world generally more sanitised. I remember vividly the purity of this first encounter and the smell of blood mixed with wet earth and pine trees. I was diagnosed with Endometriosis at fourteen and from that experience onwards all purity, all raw femininity was removed from the equation by doctors notes, opioids and eventual hospitalisations. Five surgeries and endless other ‘interventions’ later and I’m finally understanding the gravity of it all. The frivolity of these dinners — and by that I mean time, all of the time and effort that goes into them — is largely the point. In a world where taking one’s time and committing the gift of ‘real effort’ on the part of something that does not appear to be entirely ‘productive’ — all of which I feel to be exceptionally important aspects of the feminine — the act of these dinners feels like a rebellion. A disagreement with contemporary culture. They last only a night, but dependent on the creative they may take days or weeks to execute on. Such encounters used to be considered an artform, and conversation too. Magic in the mundane. Not that any of it is really all that mundane.