the script they hand to women: how convenience became our cage

I was twenty‑two, a few months into motherhood, when I walked into a chemist just to ask about family planning.
Not because I needed it.
Not because I was searching for it.
But because my sister was pressuring me to get one — she had an implant in her arm, and she assumed I should follow the same path.

Everyone around me believed my pregnancy was an accident.
They thought I had “caught it” the way they did.
But I had planned everything.
I didn’t want the fast life everyone else was living —
school, work, more work, no breath, no pause.
I wanted out.
I wanted a different rhythm.
But no one believed that, so I stopped explaining.

I walked into that chemist simply to understand what was out there.
But before I could even finish my sentence,
the woman behind the counter lit up with a sales pitch —
a coil that could stop my period completely,
no bleeding, no cycle, no interruption.

I remember standing there thinking,
how can something natural be stopped and still be called normal?
How can a body function disappear
and be marketed as convenience?

And the saddest part was knowing
how many girls had already bought into it —
not because they were careless,
but because they were taught that periods are gross,
that cramps are weakness,
that sex must never pause,
that biology is an inconvenience.

And it was a woman selling it.
Because that makes it feel safer.
More empowering.
Less questionable.

But all I saw was a system
using women to sell other women
the very things that disconnect them from themselves.

That was the moment I realised
how lost we are as a society —
how quick we are to silence the body,
how eager we are to trust the ad campaign,
how easily we confuse convenience with liberation.

That was the moment the script tried to hand itself to me.
And the moment I understood
I didn’t have to perform it.