We Were Taught to Disappear Into the Pain.

An Opinion Piece | The Middflow Project | Flow News
Category: Personal Essay & Systems Critique | Reading time: ~10 minutes
This morning I received a call from one of my team member’s husbands.
His wife — a member of my team — had started her period the previous night. By morning she was doubled over, the pain impossible to ignore. He was calling to let me know she would need the day.
Of course, I said yes. Take the time. Rest. Come back when you’re ready.
And then, before we said our goodbyes, I found myself offering unsolicited care advice to her husband — practical things, gentle things — and I noticed something in that impulse. Not just concern for a colleague, but something older. A recognition. A memory stored not in the mind but in the body.
Because I have been her.
I have been her in meetings, travelling for work, sitting in classrooms, navigating family gatherings — rolling through the pain, managing my face, managing my posture, managing the impression I made on the room — while my body staged a quiet revolt that I had been taught, firmly and repeatedly, to ignore.
And so I want to say something about that. About what we were taught. About what it cost us. And about what it is going to take to undo it.
The Things People Said
There is a specific kind of cruelty in the language used to dismiss menstrual pain.
All women go through it.
You are not the first, and you will not be the last.
Power through. You can rest later.
These are not the words of malicious people. They are the words of people — teachers, managers, family members — operating inside a belief system they inherited and never interrogated. A belief system that framed menstrual pain as a universal inconvenience rather than a clinical symptom; as a test of character rather than a condition requiring care; as an excuse rather than a signal.
My grandmother — a woman of extraordinary strength, deeply formative in how I understood what it meant to be a woman — raised us with a firm conviction: taking time to rest during your period, stepping back from physical labour, choosing your care over your commitments, was something lazy women did. Something weak women did. Something women who lacked discipline used as a cover for the work they didn’t want to do.
She believed this completely. She had been taught it completely. And she gave it to us completely.
For a significant stretch of my adult life, I carried that belief with a kind of unconscious loyalty I did not examine. I powered through pain in boardrooms and meeting rooms. I sat through long-haul flights gripping the armrest. I smiled in family settings while something inside me screamed. I made decisions about other people’s comfort and other people’s needs while my own body sent signals I had been trained to mute.
I did this even when I had the freedom and the autonomy to make a different choice. That is the insidious precision of deeply embedded conditioning: it operates even in the absence of external enforcement. The grandmother’s voice becomes your own voice. The classroom dismissal becomes your own inner policy. You become the manager of your own suppression, and you do not even notice you have taken the job.
What Pain Actually Is
Here is what I have had to learn, and unlearn, and relearn across years of paying attention to my own body:
Pain is not decoration. It is not weakness wearing a disguise. It is not a negotiating tactic deployed by women who want an afternoon off.
Pain is information.
The body does not send signals for theatre. When menstrual pain is severe — when it doubles a person over, when it interrupts sleep, when it makes ordinary movement impossible — it is communicating something that deserves to be heard, investigated, and responded to with the same seriousness we bring to any other physiological signal we don’t understand.
And this matters beyond the personal, because menstrual pain exists on a clinical spectrum that our cultural dismissal of it has made extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
Dysmenorrhea — painful menstruation — affects an estimated 50 to 90 percent of people who menstruate, with severe cases significantly impacting daily function. Endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, is one of the most underdiagnosed conditions in women’s health globally — taking an average of seven to ten years to diagnose, partly because the primary symptom presented by patients is pain that has been normalised out of the clinical conversation before it ever gets there. Adenomyosis. Fibroids. PCOS. Pelvic inflammatory disease. Every one of these conditions announces itself, in part, through pain — pain that women have been conditioned to absorb, manage, minimise, and never, under any circumstances, make a fuss about.
When we teach women to disappear into their pain rather than engage with it, we are not building resilience. We are building a diagnostic delay that, in some cases, has consequences that last a lifetime.
This is not a small thing. This is a public health failure that begins in a grandmother’s kitchen and ends in a gynaecologist’s office a decade too late.
The Extraordinary Thing Women Do Every Day
I want to be clear: I hold women who power through pain with profound respect.
The woman who runs a meeting through cramps that would send other people to hospital is not performing weakness. She is demonstrating an almost architectural capacity to function inside discomfort, to maintain exterior composure while managing an interior experience that the room around her cannot see and has likely never been asked to consider.
Think about everything that is happening simultaneously in that room: She is presenting. She is listening. She is negotiating, responding, deciding, remembering. She is doing all of this while monitoring her body — her flow, her position, her expression, the temperature of the room, the distance to the nearest bathroom. She is doing the cognitive work of the meeting and the cognitive work of the management of her body in the meeting, and she is making both look effortless.
She is extraordinary. She has always been extraordinary.
And the system has used that extraordinariness as a reason not to change.
Because if women can do all of that — if they can perform that level of managed endurance without visible disruption — then clearly, the system works. Clearly, no accommodation is needed. Clearly, the problem is not the infrastructure or the policy or the culture. The problem is the rare woman who cannot manage her pain with sufficient professionalism.
This is the trap. And it is built on the adaptive capacity of the very women it exploits.
The Unlearning
My relationship with my own menstrual pain has changed. It took time — more time than it should have, given everything I now know and everything I work within professionally. That is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about the depth of what needs to be unlearned: even inside a framework of menstrual health advocacy, the conditioning persists. It does not dissolve when you acquire the intellectual argument against it. It dissolves slowly, through repeated decisions to act differently than you were taught.
For me, the unlearning looked like this:
Learning to distinguish between pain that passes and pain that persists. Not all menstrual pain carries the same signal. Sometimes it really is a Panado moment — a brief, manageable wave that passes with rest or mild analgesia. And sometimes it is not. The obligation — our obligation to ourselves — is to develop the discernment to know the difference, and then to act on that knowledge rather than override it.
Learning to treat my pain as a source of information rather than an inconvenience to be managed around. To ask what it might be telling me, rather than how quickly I can make it quiet enough to continue.
Learning to give myself the same consideration I would give anyone else. That one took the longest. The grandmother’s voice is stubborn. The boardroom training is stubborn. The version of me that equated endurance with virtue took considerable dismantling.
And learning — perhaps most importantly — that choosing to care for myself during pain is not a withdrawal from responsibility. It is the exercise of the most fundamental responsibility I have: to understand my own body well enough to respond to it with intelligence and intention.
What This Has to Do With All of Us
The phone call this morning was about one woman in pain on one Saturday morning. But it pointed to something structural that is much larger.
We have built cultures — in workplaces, in families, in educational institutions, in public life — that treat menstrual pain as a personal problem to be managed privately, efficiently, and without inconvenience to the systems around it. We have built those cultures by taking the extraordinary adaptive capacity of menstruating people and mistaking it for evidence that no adaptation from the system was required.
The result is a population of women who do not know their own pain thresholds accurately because they have never been permitted to engage with them honestly. Who cannot tell the difference between ordinary discomfort and a clinical symptom requiring investigation — not because they lack intelligence, but because they were trained out of that distinction before they ever had the chance to develop it.
Who have delayed diagnoses of conditions that, caught earlier, might have changed the trajectory of their fertility, their chronic health, their quality of life.
Who have sat in rooms, run marathons, kept commitments, made decisions, raised children, led organisations — while their bodies sent signals into a silence they had been taught to maintain.
This is the cost of what we normalised. And it is not small.
What We Owe Each Other
When my colleague’s husband called this morning, he did not know how to frame what his wife was experiencing. He was apologetic. He was careful. He used the softening language that people use when they are not sure whether what they are describing is legitimate enough to be taken seriously.
That carefulness — that tentativeness — is itself a symptom of the culture we have built. He should not have had to wonder whether her pain warranted a day of care. She should not have had to be doubled over before the question was even asked.
What we owe each other — as colleagues, as managers, as family members, as people who share institutions and organisations and households — is a different starting assumption. One that treats menstrual pain not as an excuse until proven otherwise, but as a real physiological experience that exists on a spectrum, that carries clinical significance, and that deserves a response proportionate to its severity.
For managers and workplaces: the conversation about menstrual health policy is not a radical one. It is a practical one. When people can name what they are experiencing without shame, when they can take the time they need to care for themselves without negotiation, they return more functional, more focused, and more trusting of the institution they work within. This is not a concession. It is sound organisational practice.
For families: the beliefs we carry about menstrual pain are often the beliefs we inherited without examination. Examine them. What was handed to you may have been handed to the person who gave it to you, who received it from someone else, in a lineage of normalised suffering that nobody paused to question. You can be the person who pauses.
For all of us: pain that returns every month for thirty-eight years of a life is not background noise. It is not a tolerable inconvenience. It is a recurring experience that deserves engagement, understanding, and a response proportionate to what the body is actually saying.
Listen to the signal. Learn to know the difference. And then — this is the most important part — act on what you know.
One More Thing
The women I think about most are not the ones in crisis. They are the ones who will read this and feel a small, quiet recognition — not because their pain has been unmanageable, but because they have never been given permission to manage it on its own terms.
They are at their desks right now. They are in taxis. They are running meetings and running races and running households, doing all of it with the same invisible competence that women have always brought to the experience of existing inside systems that were not designed for them.
They deserve better than endurance. They deserve understanding — of their own bodies, of the signals those bodies send, and of the culture that taught them to distrust both.
Menstrual health is not a private problem requiring a private solution. It is a public health matter that begins with the most intimate of human experiences: the relationship between a person and the signals of their own body.
We were taught to disappear into the pain.
It is time to turn toward it instead.
The Middflow Project works at the intersection of menstrual health, economic equity, and public health systems. This opinion piece is part of our Flow News editorial series and reflects the personal perspective of the author.
Equity by Design.

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