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About Those Gooey Fluids in My Underwear
Why Making Sense of Vaginal Discharges Is a Life-Long Learning Curve
There it was — a long white mark, gooey and soft in the middle, dry and flaky on the edges. My first encounter with cervical fluid left me in a state of confusion. I was probably 13 then, and every time I went to the restroom, I came face to face with new marks I didn’t know what to think about. Is this a sign of disease? Could that be the STIs mentioned in class? Could that come from sitting on public toilets? I was warned I could catch some nasty things there.
I spent days wondering and torturing myself with questions; I finally decided to talk about it openly with my mother. She must have experienced something similar; I am pretty sure. Her answer confused me a lot more: “that might be because you think about boys”. The well-behaved girl in me was mortified. The last thing I wanted was to be seen as a “boy chaser” or as someone who thinks about sex. The conversation ended there. From then on, when I found the white watery mucus in my pants, I viewed them as stubborn signs of lust and decadence.
I would rush into washing my underwear in water. But that didn’t make the marks disappear. Instead, for a few days at a time, there would be an abundance of fluid staining my underwear, leaving me with a lot more…
