In which I give you entirely TMI about my uterus, and wonder about modern life’s impact on health.
When I’m feeling shitty, I often compare myself to an imaginary peasant ancestress to give myself some perspective. I think about the crap she’d have had to suffer through in her life, all without days off or medical care. She wouldn’t have had the wealth of free time that I have to dwell on things.
If she had the kind of period I’m having right now, she’d have just sucked it up and gone to do whatever it is that imaginary peasant ancestresses did. Milk cows and work in fields, I suppose. She wouldn’t have had Pamprin or modern feminine hygiene products; she’d be stuck with herbs and cloths. She wouldn’t have a brain full of basically unnecessary facts gleaned from the Internet that had her freaking out when she woke up in the morning, rolled over, and flooded a maxi pad in forty seconds with a frighteningly huge gush of blood. [Basically, I slept in one position all night. When I rolled over this morning, ten hours worth of blood came out at once. Sorry if that’s way TMI, but it happens.]
She wouldn’t have thought, “I read that if you don’t stop bleeding by yourself, they have to do surgery to take out your uterus.” And she wouldn’t have worked herself into a panic by the time the bleeding leveled off minutes later. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have even known about “panic,” since that’s something of a modern symptom.
I’m thinking about her because I’m having a period from hell. I’m not in pain this month, which is a blessing, but I’m bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and after my last miscarriage any heavy bleeding utterly freaks me out. I think that she wouldn’t have worried and panicked and obsessed that maybe something was wrong with her; if she passed out, then she’d know something was wrong and that would have been that. She’d have been walking, too, not sitting in her climate controlled car like I was this morning. She just wouldn’t have the time to freak like I do.
In other words, I know I’m not bleeding to death. So there’s nothing to freak out about. But knowing this doesn’t seem to stop me from freaking. My hormones are whack. I’m really moody and freaked and tired and tense. And if all that wasn’t enough, my right eye was stuck shut when I woke up. So there I am, half blind, bleeding like a stuck pig, and feeling very much like the world is coming to an abrupt and total fucking halt even though in truth I’m warm and comfortable in my Sleep Number bed and I’m well-fed and sleek and I’ve got so many blessings it would probably take an entire day to count them so who the hell am I to be feeling so sorry for myself? Where’s my freaking perspective? I’m not even in pain, fer chrissakes. My idea of what’s tolerable seems to be utterly out of whack because, well, nothing really truly bad ever happens to me. (Knock on wood.)
When I think about my imaginary peasant ancestress and compare her life to mine, I see that she was truly poor and I’m loaded by comparison, but I wonder about the real effects of so much rich food, leisure time, and lack of heavy labor. The human animal has only been living like this for a very brief while; we’re optimized for a completely different lifestyle than the ones we’re actually leading.
Which may be why we’re all fat and crazy.
The result of this rapid change seems to be a variety of physical and mental imbalances… so many people are on meds for depression or anxiety. So many of us just feel bad much more than I think we should.
Sometimes I wonder if my imaginary peasant ancestress might not have had it better than I do, at least in terms of peace of mind. She wouldn’t have had the time to dwell on the minutiae of how she felt; she’d have been working to live. And she wouldn’t have thought of it as work, it would have been life. The conceptual division of ‘work’ and ‘free time’ is a relatively new one. Perhaps the lack of that artificial differentiation would have kept her from feeling as resentful as I sometimes do; I have my mind set up to ‘enjoy’ my leisure activities and ‘dislike’ my chores, but the truth is it’s all simply stuff to do — there really isn’t that much qualitative difference, in terms of comfort or interest, between doing the laundry and knitting a fucking slipper, both are easy and climate-controlled and simple, it’s just that I like knitting and I don’t like laundry.
It strikes me as being utterly arbitrary that I make these distinctions, but I can’t help doing it. I imagine her distinctions would have been harsher: hurts, doesn’t hurt. Is dangerous, isn’t so dangerous. Can kill you, probably won’t kill you. The little shit comes out in the wash, when your life is harsher.
My imaginary peasant ancestress might even have been healthier than I am, too, barring accident or congenital defects. She’d be hauling around less fat than I am, she’d be in better cardio-vascular shape. She wouldn’t have spent even a fraction of the time I have, sitting on my ass in front of a computer digesting twice the calories I need for the day.
I realize it’s sloppy hippy-type thinking to idealize the past; there were no good old days of perfect peace and health. My imaginary peasant ancestress would have been to many, many more funerals than I have. All of her women friends would have lost children. There were no sulpha drugs, no modern dentistry, no contact lenses. No central HVAC. No warm, cozy vehicles. I’m not idealizing the past. I’d hate to have fleas or bed bugs or to see babies die from malnutrition or the measles. But I do believe that the rapid changes our species has encountered in the past few hundred years are really showing up in our headspace and drug intake. So many of us are only mildly uncomfortable but we react to it as if it’s the end of the damned world. I’m doing it myself, right now, because I have the time to do so.
Our bodies want us to live differently than we do, and there appears to be a price for all this wealth and ease. Maybe poverty and strife is actually a better way to live… providing you’re one of the lucky ones who survive, that is.