We stared at each other in silence. I panicked. What should I say? Picture: Metro.co.uk)
‘Oh gross, what’s that?’
I looked over at the guy I was dating, who was haphazardly cleaning his room (but somehow making more of a mess), and saw him holding up a pair of my underwear.
There was nothing exciting about them – they were plain black briefs from M&S.
But there was something on them that seemed unusual. Something that I’d hidden from people for years. Something I thought made me disgusting.
There was a bleached stain where my vulva sat, and it was created by my vagina.
He threw the underwear across the room and looked back at me, slowly wiping his hand on his side.
We stared at each other in silence. I panicked. What should I say?
‘It’s nothing, I don’t know.’
I grew bright red, picked up my underwear and left the house. As you can imagine, the relationship didn’t last long – and neither did my patience with men.
For years, because my vagina bleached my underwear, I believed I was unclean or that there was something wrong with me ‘down below’.
Because my family never talked about bodies, puberty or sex education, I didn’t know what it meant.
It felt like my vagina was an unknown chasm that held wizardly powers that I should never question, Sharan explains (Picture: Sharan Dhaliwal)
It started around the time I hit puberty and my body started to change. I grew hair all over my body, my nose grew out of my face and I had a underwear-bleaching vagina – I felt disgusting.
I was convinced that it kept happening because I didn’t know how to clean myself. But, it wasn’t until years later that I realised that there was nothing wrong with my vagina, or my underwear.
Growing up in, and post, the Margaret Thatcher era, where Victorian style family values were paramount, and sex education was ignored, no one talked to me about my vagina.
The one afternoon at school we had allocated to sex education had us separated into two rooms: for the boys and girls. It mostly just contained two hours worth of giggling.
As the years went by, the internet came into existence and I taught myself a lot of what I know now. I learnt how to use a tampon, what STIs are, what a UTI is (which I learnt after seeing blood in my urine), and eventually both myself and doctors came to understand my endometriosis.
For years, because my vagina bleached my underwear, I believed I was unclean, says Sharan (Picture: Sharan Dhaliwal)
Yet, for years, I still felt like I didn’t know enough. It felt like my vagina was an unknown chasm that held wizardly powers that I should never question. That I’d never truly know or understand that it was just the way things were.
I would throw away my underwear in shame whenever they became stained and never spoke about it.
Then around 10 years ago, I came across an article that …read more
Source:: Metro
