I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, but something always stopped me.
It never seemed to be the right time – or maybe I was too embarrassed or felt it was too personal. The reality is often that despite writing about your own body, other people always factor. Which is odd, I guess. Other people may not want to read it, other people may feel uncomfortable. Other people have it worse.
But fuck it, here goes.
Back in 2016, when I was a baby writer at the Soho Theatre Writers Lab, one of the first exercises they taught us was to write constantly, our pen never leaving the page. It felt incredibly invigorating until you read it back and realise what Freudian horrors had ended up written down. However, it was a way to get our minds moving without editing ourselves, and it is a very useful tool to discover what is trying to leap out of your subconscious, onto the page.
I had, in fact, recognised this technique when I was much younger. When my Dad died, I found that one way to get my feelings out was just to write everything down, constantly. There is part of me that would love to read those scatty and fractured monologues now, undoubtedly full of teenage angst, on my old brick of a Dell laptop. Despite feeling like an awkward expulsion at the time, it got my brain working after a long period of time of it floating in the grey mist of grief, looking down on my physical body, not sure how to reunite the two together again.
I realise now I am older that when my brain starts to run into difficulty, it gets stuck. Not in the same way that grief suspends you upwards; it is more debilitating. Like falling into a vat of cement, or trying to find your way out of an intensely thick forest. It can become so difficult to navigate that more often than not, instead of continuing to struggle on, my brain starts dissolving things altogether.
I have always had problems with my periods, as many others do. The age of thirteen at a sleepover I had screamed through the night, writhing in pain, which was eventually diagnosed as an ovarian cyst. I continued to have these throughout my teenage years, getting so bad at one point that (look away now if you’re squeamish) my entire ovary twisted up my fallopian tube in distress. I was put on the contraceptive pill at a reasonably young age to combat this, and overall it seemed to help.
Before we continue – It is an argument for another day but how fucked up is it that there is little to no research in menstrual pain? A friend of mine has to essentially book a week off work every month because her period pains all but cripple her. In 2020. Madness.
However, fast forward fifteen years later and my body started to suffer the consequences of being medicated for that long. I noticed post coital bleeding during my last relationship in 2017, and therefore began the journey that pretty much every woman I have ever met has had at once point – Why am I bleeding irregularly, and am I, therefore, dying?
I hit my 25th birthday and become old enough to have my first smear test. The results, true to form, were iffy. A spoonful of HPV with a sprinkle of pre-cancerous cells, I wouldn’t have expected anything less! Good one, vag.
My body is introduced to a main character in this story – the speculum. For those of you don’t know, it looks like this.
First used by the ancient Greeks and Romans, a speculum is a common tool used by Gynaecologists to open the walls of the vagina and examine the vagina and cervix. It looks pretty medieval and feels really not that great. In fact, many people find it very traumatic.
The rhetoric around smear tests is a complicated one. I appreciate the narrative that ‘it’s really not that big a deal, it takes 10 mins, in-out-done, book it now!’ which is, in a lot of cases, entirely true and encourages many women to go through with a routine procedure that can help identify problems early on. However, I think at times the complications of these kinds of procedures are overlooked and trivialised, which can have devastating effects in the long term.
Anyway, I go on to have my first transvaginal examination soon after and me and ole’ speccy becomes frenemies over time. I learn pretty quickly that it is a necessary evil and the sooner I come to terms with it, the better.
The doctors eventually find the cause of my bleeding, which turns out to be a cervical ectropion.
Don’t google it. Just, don’t. Trust me on this.
To fill you in, an ectropion occurs when the lining of the uterus starts to creep out of the cervix. It is pretty common and usually (whilst disgusting) not much to worry about. But guess what it is caused by? You guessed it… The Pill! We’ve come to a bit of a crossroads here, haven’t we? I stopped taking contraception immediately, and we all hoped it would eventually go away.
It didn’t. The Docs had started to become a little worried at this point – turns out, my ectropion was really going the full nine yards and had caused my pre-cancerous cells go from ‘mild’ to ‘severe’ in a short amount of time. The word’ routine’ became ‘necessary’ which eventually became ‘essential.’
In the coming months, OPERATION BLAST THE FUCKER started to come into play. We tried everything to get rid of it. Biopsies, colposcopies, even cauterising the tip of my cervix. Nothing worked. The only thing that eventually got rid of the bitch for good was something called an LLETZ procedure, which essentially scrapes out the lining of your cervix with a laser. Pretty routine, but very uncomfortable and can result in finding carrying a baby to term difficult if the laser goes even 2mm too deep.
It goes without saying that I was not having a good time.
It became increasingly obvious that in the midst of all these visits to the hospital, I was starting to get a bit, well, stuck.
This is the part that I’m not going to explore fully, out of respect to my partner Ben and his/our privacy. But believe me when I tell you, if you haven’t already experienced it, trying to continue a healthy relationship during quite an intense medical journey is incredibly difficult.
I had, which I only truly realised months later, started to experience Vaginismus, which sounds like something Hermione Granger would use to get rid of menstrual cramping. In reality, Vaginismus feels like a tight muscle contraction and makes sexual intercourse or any sexual activity that involves penetration painful or impossible.
Not good.
Due to a heady mix of painful and traumatic procedures and, of course, our old pal speccy, my body had ceased to feel like my own. Any sensation down there had become one of medicinal necessity, not pleasure. Not intimacy. Not love. Just pain.
I had been thrown back in the cement vat once more, and this time it didn’t just effect me, but the person who I loved the most. The slow deterioration of the intimate side of my relationship was devastating to witness, but I was behind a glass screen and screaming silently at a scene I couldn’t change. Any intimacy or affection at all became incredibly difficult to bear. Even a simple hand on my leg from anyone would cause me to shake with rage; the back of my neck became sweaty and my throat slowly started to close up. I spent many nights on the sofa, staring into space until the early hours, when I eventually made the journey back upstairs to bed. Another day ticked off. Silent nights with huge spaces between the two of us. Both feeling rejected, humiliated, and alone.
It is worth saying at this point that many partners would, understandably, choose to get off the ride they never signed up for. But he didn’t. Which I am eternally thankful for.
Then, at the start of 2020, I had a breakthrough.
I arrived at my office job in central London at 9am, where I was working as a secretary at the time. My chest was tight, but as a general anxiety sufferer that was just another Tuesday. It would probably wear off by lunchtime.
My manager and I had gone into an empty office to move some desks around for a new client moving in, the cold February sun bathing the room with a pale glow. I had barely moved one desk when a simple question of ‘Something seems up, are you okay?’ gripped me by the throat and shook free a memory I didn’t know I had, causing it to spill out onto the floor in front of us.
I have typed this sentence out a thousand different ways, but sometimes it’s easier to wrap the plaster off, isn’t it?
I was touched inappropriately during my first transvaginal examination.
By someone who I had put my trust into, because they are supposed to keep you safe.
The rage. The burning touch. The pain. The pure, unadulterated, RAGE. It all suddenly made sense.
I am still unable to describe it as sexual assault, which many of my closest friends and therapist have assured me it is, but I am just not there yet. Despite having spoken publicly about that exact subject and the MeToo movement during my play Anomaly’s run, I still burn with embarrassment that I am not able to define my own personal experience. ‘People have had it worse.’ ‘It wasn’t this, or that, It was just… something.’
Something happened, and now it’s spilt all over the floor in front of me.
I went home. I told Ben. I told my Mum. I went back to see my therapist that I have seen since I was 17. She led me to define what had happened and speak it out loud. I had to teach myself how to be touched again, how to be vulnerable, how to breathe, how to communicate. One step forward, two back. But onwards, nevertheless.
If any part of this has resonated with you, please know that you are not alone. As women we often feel at the mercy of other people when it comes to our bodies and the trauma it goes through. But this year, I have slowly started to unstick my brain, and reclaim the part of myself that I left in that hospital room.
It is mine, not his. Mine to share with anyone I want, and only on my own terms.
It is an agreement, not an invasion.
Love, not pain.
and I am starting to see that now.
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