You know that feeling when your period is due on a really important day, say, an exam, or a holiday, or the time you and your significant other are meant to be celebrating some sort of anniversary? Well, Kiran Gandhi had that right before running the London marathon.
And Kiran gets super-heavy periods. So she also opted - and brace yourselves, because it's radical - to not wear a tampon for the 26.2 mile race.
You might wonder why the fuck she did that. Well, there are two reasons, and the first was purely personal. Kiran's periods are so heavy that she would've had to faff about changing tampons halfway through: 'It would have been way too uncomfortable to worry about a tampon for 26.2 miles,' she blogged.
The second was political. She explained: 'I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who don’t have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesn’t exist. I ran to say, it does exist, and we overcome it every day.'
Running for a cause like this might seem ridiculous, but if you think about it, all marathon runners run for causes, charities, societies and the like...so why wouldn't someone want to run while making a point about the prejudice, stigma and shame women's periods get?
And you know how you might wear black knickers to hide period stains? Kiran wore bright pink, because she wanted people to see her free bleed. She told Cosmopolitan: 'This one older lady ran up by me and she said, "You have your period!" She looked very disgusted when she was informing me about that. [Laughs.] And I just say with a thumbs up, "No way! Didn't realise that. Thank you"'
After blogging about it, Kiran says she's got a lot of validation in replies from people who are too, crying out for a little period pride: 'That is my favorite part about this whole thing, that people are remembering that women have this thing that they have to deal with … That's a big fucking deal.'
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.