Member-only story
My body has always been something that made me uncomfortable. I was acutely aware of how my arms were darker than my classmates in elementary school. I noticed how they were covered in thick, dark hair…mostly because my classmates would point out that they were covered in thick, dark hair.
But my Punjabi background wasn’t the only thing that me feel a little out of place in my body. It was my body itself, and all of the things it put me through.
I was ten when I first got my period. By 12, I was blacking out at school from dizziness and vomiting in the bathroom stall at lunch from the overwhelming nausea that came along with it. By 14, I was barely able to walk during that special time of the month, missing school for a couple of days every month because my uterus decided to wage war against me.
Around 14, I began seeing spots in my vision when I ate foods with certain ingredients, and I knew that was the telltale sign for the migraines that would leave me curled up in a dark room for days. I haven’t eaten hard candies in almost fifteen years because of the migraines they’d trigger in my youth. The nausea, the excruciating pain in my brain. Like a pickaxe being tapped repeatedly into my skull.
I lost a lot of days in every month to my migraines and my period pains. I would be diagnosed with PCOS (poly cystic…
