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‘Girls are superheroes. Who else could bleed for a week and not die?’

(A very true internet meme)

All women remember their first period. Where it happened; who they were with; what raced through their mind and what they did about it. Or didn’t. The sight of blood anywhere is frightening. In your pants, it’s terrifying.

I want to share the story of my first period with you for two reasons. One – quite frankly it would feel rude not to in a book about the red stuff. Two – my mum’s reaction goes some way to explaining why period pride came quite naturally to me.

But even though I have felt pretty confident about busting the period taboo at each stage of my life, to my horror I still utterly failed to achieve a diagnosis for a serious period condition ravaging my insides for more than two decades. I wish to open up to you about this particularly agonising chapter of my life to show that even if you have never spoken about periods aloud before – yours or someone else’s – you can start now. And you should.

Apart from kicking off a much needed cultural shift around the silence that engulfs periods, it was only when I admitted to a friend how much pain I was in each month, that she suggested I might have a proper illness, which prompted me to push for a GP referral to a specialist. More women need to be heard to be believed. And only by talking more about our periods, can we learn what’s normal and what isn’t – and that actually, we’re bleeding superheroes.

I started my period just shy of my eleventh birthday in a cold toilet cubicle in Manchester’s House of Fraser. As I was an only child with a devoted mother, who delighted in my every milestone, I shouted out to her from the cubicle that there was something browny-red in my knickers. She told me, breathlessly, that I had indeed ‘become a woman’ and started my period. I’d just started reading Judy Blume books and had a vague idea this was a good but major thing. And then she left. In a panic. Off she ran around the whole shop floor telling anyone and everyone her little girl was having her first bleed and asking around for a spare pad. Subtle. A few minutes later, I opened the door and watched as she gently stuck a large pad down into my stained pants. Her excitement was infectious.

I remember feeling like I’d done something positive and exceedingly grown up. And when we walked out of the loo, I recall bashfully taking in the smiling faces of the female shop floor staff, as if I’d just won gold in the Woman Olympics. I now know my lovely mum was trying to make up for how her own mother had reacted to her first period. My mother was told, in the swinging sixties no less, that she was ill and put to bed. No explanation was given, but it became clear that it was a subject that was off limits for discussion – the final irony being that her father was a doctor! It was a terribly confusing, scary and negative experience for her.

Mine couldn’t have been more different. On the day of my first period – over a celebratory steaming hot chocolate – as my mum delivered a basic explanation of what had just occurred (something along the lines of ‘this will happen every month and welcome to the woman club’), she was beaming and almost crying with pride. I was excited, but I also remember asking her not to tell my father. I’m not sure why I wanted to keep it from him but it was probably because it concerned something dirty in my pants to do with my vagina and he didn’t have one.