Women Shouldn’t Have To Be Embarrassed By This, Period!

I am seventeen, going out with some friends, old and new, for a night at a restaurant. I, unfortunately, get the unexpected visit of my period. I have not brought my purse with me tonight, and I did not plan to have hygiene products in my pockets. I try asking the only other female in the group but she says she has nothing.

I’m too shy to go from table to table and ask strangers around — the bathroom is a single, so it’s not like I can meet someone there and ask discreetly. I try to fix something out of the thin, see-through toilet paper but with poor results. I’m awfully uncomfortable; I can’t wait for this dinner to be over and go home.

Misfortune keeps coming; everyone insists that we go over to the home of one of the guys — a male-only house that won’t have anything to help my problem — and watch a movie. I try to decline but they won’t let me back out.

I’m then dragged with them to the video rental store. I manage to make some weird excuse to let them go choose a movie while I “wait for them outside.”

As soon as the door closes behind them, I make a run to a pharmacy we passed, buy whichever package of hygiene products I can find that will fit in my pants pocket, borrow their “staff-only” bathroom — all my gratitude to the cashier who understood the situation and graciously let me in; you’re a real sister! — and dash back to the video rental store just in time for my friends to come out. We go watch the movie, and the whole time, I’m crossing my fingers that my suddenly overstuffed pockets won’t explode or be too noticeable. 

I kind of forget about this bad evening until sometime later when some of my “older” friends mention the new guys that joined us that night. I haven’t seen them since, but my friends are talking like they have seen them recently, so I ask about them; I’m curious why I was not invited.

It turns out they believed I was not really friendly, like all I wanted was to go away. They said I was either saying strange things to withdraw or looking blank or worried, which they took offense to because it’s not like they were dangerous or about to do anything wrong. They decided that I must be some psycho-loner-paranoid-b****, so they’d rather not see me again. Because, sure, my whole night experience was about those guys. All points of view are required to understand what happened, and you may never know others’; don’t only stick to your side and judge too fast.