The cyborg alternatives
The greatest fear was teenage pregnancy. Not mine but all around, it was the region with the highest rate in the UK, in Europe so they said. This was something about poverty, and work, and being able to hold down a job, or fly off on a career high and escape the region. Don’t get weighed down by pregnancy and a baby they all said. And I paid heed. The prescription was microgynon, no questions asked, no answers offered, it was an obvious solution. Side-effects were minimal in contrast to the other scenario. The green metallic packet resided in my purse. I’d take it daily, or lazily, mixing up the time. Sometimes I’d forget and carelessly take a few at once as a personal revolt to the task and the overbearance of doctors, hospitals and medicine. It was good to skip periods. Keeping on popping it made me feel less like woman or girl, paradoxically. I didn’t worry about weight, or mood swings until later. The central concerns were maintaining a non-maternal state, building a slate of grades and extracurricular activities and having a boyfriend that you would later cast off after escaping the region.
Then I worried about weight and mood swings. I spoke to a friend who said she didn’t and never would take the pill. I was shocked, confused, outraged. She had a boyfriend. I didn’t know this was an option. I had taken the same pill for five years. Minimal appointments with doctors and nurses through which I would mumble acquiescence and squirm to have blood pressure tested, yielded no other solutions. It was all inconvenience and convenience. Until the pattern of anger and sadness overwhelmed the horror of attending surgery and the ease of contraception. Gradually the body made itself known. I was submitting it to control, I was training it for a sexual life that I had never reflected on. Pregnancy a problem, until it isn’t. Putting in some years of unattached freedom, preparation, foundations for one thing, before another. Be careful not do it out of sync, get in sync, marshal your thoughts, aspirations, body and hormones. Think about your body every day, think about your relationship, don’t express it, don’t know what is feeling and what is affect. But regulation tears affected us both and so we both decided I would stop taking the pill.
It felt unprecedented and transgressive. Periods became heavier and irregular, my body stayed about the same, the tears still came but with less force and then more force but there was nothing left to change.
I got to another place and rested there. The freedom of contraception started feeling like a trap. Or a framework marshalled by a discourse in which I was not permitted to speak, or just couldn’t or could only say one thing. The cyborg alternatives nestling inside felt more apposite, something closer to superhuman or hybrid – although they play in the key of one hormonal gender. What is it to be made more woman, more feminine. And it’s unclear what to run from now, as we all just try to stay still in a wretched city. The group spoke about what we took or didn’t, and now the table had turned. So many of us had turned away from chemical contraception. Although yasmin if you can get it, was the consensus choice. And the conversation was not all contraception, but mood, clearness of skin, weight, and blood pressure: we spoke and wrote with the weight of some experience and the feeling of our bodies.
For a few weeks, some weeks ago, I tried to organise the calendar on my gmail so I could register at a doctor’s, get an appointment, go on the pill. Rigmarole of a relationship. But in the flurry of term time and work, and that career that was protected from disruption, I couldn’t find time. Took time instead to look elsewhere, plunged into internet searches and talked with others, the other person in the relationship. No hormones, no coil, no implant. Still attention paid. New attention paid. Without administration or responsibility.
Submitted by Anonymous