We Don’t Talk About This Part (Periods)

"I'm on my period"

I can’t do a triple axel. I can ice skate, but don’t ask me to brake.

And yet here is an elite athlete landing world class jumps while actively shedding the lining of her uterus, performing in front of millions as if her body were not simultaneously demanding attention, energy, and resilience.

We applaud the performance, we celebrate the discipline, we replay the medal moment, but we rarely pause to consider what her body is doing at the exact same time.

The cramps, the hormonal shifts, the fatigue, the brain fog and the emotional intensity that can arrive without warning.

We talk about excellence as if it exists in a vacuum, as if the body is neutral and biology politely steps aside for greatness, as if physical reality does not shape performance.

It does. Half the population bleeds every month, and it is normal, biological, and deeply human.

What is not normal is the silence around it.

Because the moment women speak openly about the toll it can take, about the pain, the exhaustion, the volatility, it risks being weaponised against them.

She is too emotional.

Maybe she is not stable under pressure.

If she cannot handle this, can we trust her with more?

So many of us learn, often very early, to minimise it, to schedule around it, to medicate it, to smile through it, to pretend that it does not affect us in any meaningful way.

Not because it does not, but because credibility still feels conditional.

There is often a quiet calculation running in the background: if I acknowledge that this hurts, that I am tired, that my body is not fully cooperating, will it cost me respect, opportunities, or trust? Will it confirm someone’s bias about what women are capable of?

So we power through.

And powering through is not effortless, even if it is invisible.

Having a period does not make women less capable; it means we are capable while managing something additional, something cyclical, something physical, something that can be painful, draining, destabilising, and yet entirely normal.

We are not asking for applause for this reality, and we are not asking for lowered expectations.

We are asking for honesty, for nuance, and for the possibility that high performance and biological reality can coexist without one cancelling out the other.

We are not strong in spite of our bodies.

We are strong with them.

Maybe it is time we stopped pretending that excellence requires silence, and started acknowledging that women have always been performing at a high level, even while bleeding, even while in pain, even while nobody wanted to hear about it.

And that deserves to be part of the story.