Today, I pack my life into boxes 📦

Less of a 'how to' and more of a 'please help'

It’s 9:54 a.m., and I’m on day 25 of my cycle. In menstrual cycle awareness work, we take time at the end of each month to listen to our bodies and reflect. We ask, “How am I feeling physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually?”

Honestly, it’s my boobs that take the mic today. They are big and sore, the sweet things, and it’s no wonder. I’ve taken two international flights this month (stress), drank coffee (caffeine is linked to breast tenderness in some women), downed tequila shots at a Boston wedding (so is alcohol), dealt with divorce lawyers (the breasts are considered an energetic extension of the heart in Traditional Chinese Medicine), and this is just how my body communicates with me—has been since I was 14. I stopped trying to ‘fix’ all my menstrual ‘symptoms’ a while ago, choosing instead to become familiar with the patterns of communication and adjust, where possible, accordingly. I try to welcome them like old friends, and listen.

But I didn’t intend to write to you about pre-menstrual breast tenderness this morning. Today, I’m packing up the last eight years of my life into boxes, selling some things, and giving others away. And I do feel the best way to get started on a mammoth-sized project like this one, is to sit down and write about it.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says:

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We age and die, beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant, we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important, and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us.”

Let it be known that today I, Claire Baker, will have to decide whether to keep the kimono-style red robe my ex gave me for my 32nd birthday or send eight years of journals home to Australia to gather dust in my parents’ attic. I will have to decide whether the matryoshka doll I bought at the Mauerpark flea market in Berlin is coming with me or finding a new home via the Oxfam Superstore.