Graveyard Dirt

Vogue Italia, November 1985.

Banner art by Melissa Gay (@melissagayart / site)

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"Founded in 1051, this nearly 1,000-year-old monastery has survived centuries of wars, invasions, and empires. Today, it bears the scars of another Russian attack."

Like, seriously, women should be educated about their own bodies.

So if you're on the other side of 45 and suddenly everything is twice as difficult, you get more migraines, your blood pressure goes funny, you can't sleep and you feel like your entire psyche is unstable, you might be experiencing perimenopause. My gyn was like,oh, like think of it like reverse puberty, your entire body rearranges itself. I was like, Great, nobody ever told me it can be this bad. My GP didn't even ask me about my period or hormone levels or anything. He just told me I was probably depressed and sent me to a psychiatrist, who also didn't ask about my period or my hormones. If I hadn't experienced something akin to postpartum depression and therefore know what my body does when its hormones are out of whack, I would have had no idea.

Seriously, nobody tells you how much hormones fuck you up as a woman. Nobody prepares you for this.

I've been trying to talk openly about what's fucking me up right now, and I've discovered that it's a lot more common than I thought it was. I feel like every phase of life finds another way to fuck women over. Puberty: have fun with your period as it adjusts itself. Childbirth: prepare for a hormonal rollercoaster. PMS: oh, it can get BAD. Like, BAD. After birth: hormones out of whack for months, maybe longer. Perimenopause: can fuck up everything. Like literally everything. Osteoporosis is also hormonal. Post menopause: supposedly things get better, but they don't have to.

And I feel like we're left pretty alone dealing with all of it. And we know so little about it that we're left wondering why suddenly nothing works anymore. So we flail about and feel terrible about our sudden inability to cope with life, when it's in fact our bodies screwing with us. Again.

~Solomonic Conjurations in the Cemetery~

'Spray of Flowers and Ferns' (date unknown) by Titian Ramsay Peale (American, 1799 - 1885).

Oil on metal.

The Baltic States have yet to receive acknowledgement for the horrors that happened here from ones that did this to us, let alone an apology.

The Baltic States have yet to receive acknowledgement for the horrors that happened here from ones that did this to us, let alone an apology.