I stumbled across this Instagram post from Freya @wayofthewildwoman and felt something ancient stir inside me. It was as if someone had reached into the marrow of my bones and pulled out a knowing that had always been there but had never quite found the words. The feminine has been pathologised. Not just in my lifetime, not just in the moments I have been silenced, shamed, and diagnosed, but for centuries. For as long as women have bled, felt, grieved, and raged, we have been told that our emotions, our bodies, our very essence are a problem to be fixed.
Reading these words was like opening a door to a conversation I have been circling my entire life. I have felt the weight of this history pressing against my skin. I have known the sting of being told my pain was irrational, my grief too much, my rage unnatural. And I have seen, through my own story and the stories of so many others, how the world still forces women to believe that their suffering is an illness rather than a response to deep injustice.
This post put words to something I have lived, and something I have spent years unravelling. It resonated with the work of Dr Jessica Taylor, whose book Sexy But Psycho exposes how women are so often diagnosed rather than believed. It echoed the powerful critiques of psychiatric labelling found in the Drop the Disorder movement, which calls for a reframing of mental health that acknowledges trauma rather than branding it as a personality defect.
I want to add my voice to this conversation because it is not just about me. It is about all of us. It is about the way society responds to women’s pain, how it gaslights us into thinking our suffering is a symptom rather than a sign of something deeply broken in the world. It is about reclaiming the wisdom that has been stripped from us, remembering that our bodies are not defective, and that our emotions are not disorders but messages.
This is not just personal. It is collective. It is historic. It is about survival, and it is about change.
Below is a transcription the full post that first reignited this fire in me. From there, we will dive deeper into what this means, how it has played out in my own life, and how we can begin to reclaim the wisdom that was never meant to be lost.
“The Feminine Has Been Pathologised
Systematically severed, suppressed and violently torn from our oracle, our womb, our wild feminine medicine. The mystery and magic of our menstrual blood, the gnosis held in our blood, flesh and bones.
We have been taught to fear the chaos, the chaotic force of creation that is the feminine spirit. The spirit that feeds and births all life, the cosmic womb who births us all. We have been taught to fear our wild knowing, the current that comes crashing through our bodies and psyche, dissolving all that is not rooted in truth.
Our oracle and wild feminine medicine has been pathologised, stuffed into boxes of ‘diagnoses’, the symptoms of systematic violence and suppression of the feminine over thousands of years diluted down into a diagnosis of psychosis of our minds.
So that we form an identity around being ‘disordered’ instead of trusting the wisdom of our bodies expressing symptoms, trying to bring our attention to a deep grief asking to be felt and released, to a hormonal or emotional imbalance asking to be tended to.
Our womb holds the medicine we seek.
That is why the womb is feared, that is why we have been taught to internalise shame of our blood, our cycles.
That is why the Greek origin for womb is ‘hystera’, literally meaning hysterical or hysteria, a madness and chaos of the mind. That is why the earliest ‘healthcare’ for women was ‘treating’ hysteria with pharmaceuticals and a vibrator, or electroshock therapy, lobotomy, and left to rot in an asylum for the mentally insane.
The patriarchal forces of the predator are stalking women through every institution and western medical care posed as systems that will heal us. In truth, these systems have been built on the bones of forgotten women, on violence and suppression of the feminine. The origin of western medicine was founded on the torture and testing of Indigenous women and mothers. Have we forgotten this truth? These systems were never meant to serve us.
They were built by the same forces who tied our sisters to the pyre and lit the match. They were built by the same forces that violate the feminine spirit, the earth and our women.
They were never meant to heal us, so we must heal ourselves.
We Must Reclaim Our Wild Feminine Medicine
• Our wombs
• Our oracle
• Our truth
• Our gnosis
• Our blood wisdom
• Our bodies as our own
We Must Reclaim and Remember Our Medicine Women
• Our healers and tenders of woman
• We must remember and reclaim whole woman care
• We must centre mothers and children
• We must tend to birth and death like our ancestral grandmothers did
• We must remember our ways of healing with herbs and our hands
• We must remember and reclaim the witch, the midwives, the herbalists
• We must honour and tend to these thresholds and initiations
Instead of pathologising women, we must listen. We must cultivate and grow spaces of healing from the roots up. Strip away diagnoses of the mind and descend into the deep wisdom calling to be presenced by the body. For we know, women, we know how to heal, to mend, to weave and make whole. We remember, our wombs and our bodies remember how to heal ourselves. Can we trust the voice of our wombs and wild medicine once more?
Can we return to the knowing in our blood, flesh and bones?
There is another way, and it is older than time. Feel back to when our ancient grandmothers tended to the full cycle of life and death, who knew what herbs healed and what foods nourished. Feel back to when we gathered in caves, in red tents, in huts built from animal hide under the full moon. Remember how women gathered to tend to ourselves and each other, to honour and revere the wisdom of our cyclical nature, our menstrual blood.
This wisdom is not lost. It lives within us. The embers left burning by our ancestors. Sisters, we must breathe life into the fire of our wombs, to revive what has been forgotten, lost, discarded and buried deep within the bones of our selves. Can we lift these forgotten bones up to our lips and breathe life into the fire of our collective reclamation? The feminine spirit remembers. Woman, come home to yourself. Remember the medicine of your wild womb.”
— Freya @wayofthewildwoman (Freya also writes on substack, check her out here)
For centuries, the wild, cyclical, intuitive, and deeply feeling nature of the feminine has been cast as something to be controlled, tamed, or treated. From the concept of hysteria in the 19th century to modern psychiatric labels like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), depression, and anxiety, women’s natural responses to trauma, oppression, and life’s rhythms have been medicalised, diagnosed, and often used against them.
This is what pathologisation means. It is the process of labelling normal emotional, psychological, or bodily experiences as disorders that must be fixed, often without addressing the root cause. It is the framing of pain, rage, grief, and intuition as symptoms of mental illness rather than as wisdom calling for deeper acknowledgment.
I know this story firsthand.
As a teenager, after surviving rape, sexual abuse, and the humiliation of having intimate videos of me shared without my consent, I found myself in a system that did not ask, “What happened to you?” but instead told me, “Something is wrong with you.”
I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a label overwhelmingly given to young women with histories of trauma. My symptoms were emotional volatility, fear of abandonment, dissociation, self-destructive behaviours, and intense mood swings. But these were not signs of a disordered personality. They were a completely normal response to an abnormal situation.
Yet the diagnosis carried a weight I did not fully understand at the time.
It shaped the way I saw myself as a young person, already vulnerable and trying to make sense of what had happened to me. The label came with an unspoken sentence. It told me I was unstable, manipulative, incapable of maintaining relationships, and that my suffering was something innate rather than something inflicted upon me. It was described as a lifelong condition, something I would struggle with forever.
I believed it.
I internalised the idea that I was broken beyond repair. That no one would love me, that I would sabotage every good thing in my life, and that my emotions were a liability rather than a response to profound pain. It made me feel unworthy of care and connection, because who would want to be close to someone with a disorder that made them “too much”?
Rather than being held in my pain and guided towards healing, I was pathologised. The medical model turned my trauma into a personality defect.
Years later, after doing my own research, I began to question everything I had been told. I started learning about trauma, embodiment, and the nervous system. Through yoga, mindfulness, and journalling, I began to process what had happened to me in a way that psychiatric labels never allowed for. Instead of believing I was defective, I started to understand my reactions as the body’s way of coping with extreme stress.
The more I learnt, the more I rejected the label of BPD. It did not fit me, and more importantly, it did not serve me to believe it about myself. I was not broken, disordered, or destined to live a life of instability. I was a person who had experienced deep harm, and once I had the right tools, I was able to heal.
Years later, I no longer met the criteria for BPD. Not because of medication, not because of therapy, but because I was finally safe. Safety, validation, and healing revealed what I always suspected. I was never broken. I was responding exactly as any human would in the wake of deep violation and betrayal.
This is not just my story. It is the story of so many women who have been silenced, shamed, and misdiagnosed. In this blog and the accompanying podcast episode, I want to explore:
• How women’s emotions and bodies have been pathologised throughout history
• How modern psychiatry often mislabels trauma responses as personality disorders
• Why diagnosing women with disorders rather than addressing systemic harm keeps power structures intact
• And most importantly, how we can reclaim our truth, our wildness, and our wisdom
It is time to drop the disorder. It is time to stop medicalising the sacred feminine. It is time to listen to our bodies, our emotions, and our wounds, not as signs of illness but as guides leading us home.
How the Feminine Has Been Pathologised
“Our oracle and wild feminine medicine has been pathologised, stuffed into boxes of ‘diagnosis’s’, the symptoms of systematic violence and suppression of the feminine over thousands of years diluted down into a diagnosis, of psychosis of our minds.”
The suppression of the feminine is not just a metaphor. It is a historical and ongoing reality that has played out in the medical, psychological, and social treatment of women. The wild, cyclical, intuitive, and embodied aspects of femininity have long been cast as dangerous, irrational, or in need of correction. What was once seen as sacred has been reframed as dysfunctional.
Historically, women’s emotions, bodies, and inner wisdom have been medicalised and controlled. The term “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for womb, hystera, and for centuries, it was used as a catch-all diagnosis for women who displayed any form of emotional distress, sexual desire, or defiance of societal expectations. These women were subjected to institutionalisation, electroshock therapy, and even forced sterilisation. Their suffering was never seen as valid. Instead, it was treated as an illness.
Modern psychiatry has evolved, but the pattern remains. Women who express distress, rage, grief, or deep sensitivity are still frequently diagnosed with psychiatric disorders rather than having their pain acknowledged as a rational response to trauma and injustice. Dr Jessica Taylor, in her book Sexy But Psycho, argues that women are routinely given mental health labels such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, or Depression when in reality, they are experiencing the effects of violence, abuse, and systemic oppression.
The Drop the Disorder movement challenges this medicalisation, advocating for a trauma-informed approach that does not rely on psychiatric labels. It highlights how women, particularly those who have experienced abuse, are often diagnosed with personality disorders when they are actually responding in completely human ways to pain, betrayal, and neglect. Instead of questioning why so many women suffer from emotional dysregulation, anxiety, or dissociation, the system continues to individualise the problem. It places the burden on the woman rather than recognising the conditions that created her suffering.
This is the cycle of pathologisation. Women’s natural states, emotional expression, cyclical moods, sensitivity, and even spiritual connection, have been reframed as disorders. The same systems that once called women hysterical now call them disordered. The methods of control have changed, but the core message remains the same.
It is not women who are broken. It is the system that refuses to acknowledge their suffering.
The Misdiagnosis of Trauma as Disorder
For centuries, women’s emotional distress has been treated as a sign of disorder rather than a response to their lived experiences. Whether through the historical diagnosis of hysteria or the modern labelling of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), the medical system has repeatedly pathologised women instead of addressing the reasons behind their suffering.
Women and girls are still frequently diagnosed with BPD, depression, bipolar disorder, or other mood disorders when they express distress, rage, grief, or sensitivity. These labels are often applied without considering the underlying causes, particularly experiences of abuse, neglect, or systemic oppression. A woman who is deeply affected by betrayal, abandonment, or trauma is seen as unstable rather than as someone responding to an unbearable reality.
This pattern is not new. The diagnosis of hysteria was used for centuries to justify the institutionalisation of women who displayed any form of emotional or sexual autonomy. Women who grieved too loudly, resisted control, or experienced sexual desire were declared hysterical and subjected to treatments designed to suppress their emotions. Many were locked away in asylums, given electroshock therapy, or even lobotomised in an effort to render them compliant. The underlying assumption was that women’s emotions were dangerous and needed to be controlled.
Although hysteria is no longer recognised as a medical condition, the same patterns persist. BPD is now one of the most common diagnoses given to women who have survived sexual violence and abuse. Research has shown that a high percentage of women diagnosed with BPD have histories of sexual trauma, yet rather than receiving trauma-informed support, they are given a label that suggests their suffering is due to a disordered personality rather than an entirely understandable response to harm.
Emotional dysregulation, one of the key criteria for BPD, is often a survival mechanism rather than a disorder. When a person has experienced prolonged trauma, particularly in childhood or adolescence, their nervous system becomes hypervigilant, constantly scanning for danger. This can lead to intense emotional reactions, difficulty trusting others, and deep fears of abandonment. These are not signs of an inherently flawed personality. They are protective responses, developed to help someone survive in an unsafe world.
When trauma is mistaken for mental illness, it reinforces the idea that the problem lies within the individual rather than in the conditions that shaped them. Instead of asking, “What happened to you?” the system continues to ask, “What is wrong with you?” This shift in perspective is crucial because it determines whether a person is offered genuine support or simply labelled and left to navigate their pain alone.
The War Against the Wild Feminine
“Our womb holds the medicine we seek.”
For generations, women have been told that their power is a problem. The body, the womb, the emotions, and the deep knowing that lives within us have been framed as unpredictable, irrational, and in need of control. The feminine has been severed, dismissed, and dismembered—our wisdom reduced to superstition, our emotions reduced to disorder, our sensitivity reduced to weakness.
But what happens when we stop believing that story?
The medicalisation of women’s emotions is not just an unfortunate oversight. It is part of a long history of erasing the feminine as a source of power. Women who once served as healers, midwives, oracles, and spiritual leaders were burned, silenced, and cast out of their own traditions. Their knowledge of the body, of the cycles, of the ways in which we are connected to nature and each other, was branded as dangerous.
That legacy did not end with the witch hunts. It continued in the asylums, in the psychiatric wards, in the medical establishments that declared that women’s suffering was an illness to be treated rather than a sign of deep injustice. It continues today in the overdiagnosis of women with Borderline Personality Disorder, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, and Bipolar Disorder for feeling too much. It continues in the way women’s pain is disbelieved, whether in a hospital room or a therapist’s office.
Rage, intuition, grief, and sensitivity have all been pathologised because they are inconvenient to systems of control. A woman who is disconnected from her emotions is easier to silence. A woman who believes she is broken will seek external validation rather than trusting herself. A woman who is taught to fear her own body will willingly hand over her power to someone else.
But what if rage is a teacher?
What if grief is a portal?
What if sensitivity is a gift?
What if intuition is the deepest kind of truth?
Reclaiming What Was Taken
To heal from this severance, we do not need to invent something new. We need to remember. The wisdom we have been told to fear has always been within us. It lives in the body. It lives in the way we feel, sense, and respond to the world. It lives in our blood and bones, waiting to be recognised again.
Rage is not hysteria. It is the body’s way of saying, Enough. It is a force that clears the way for something new. When we let ourselves witness our own anger instead of suppressing it, it stops festering. It becomes fire, passion, and fuel for change.
Grief is not depression. It is a sacred threshold, a descent into the underworld of our own hearts. Grief is love with nowhere to go, a sign that we have deeply cared. When we allow ourselves to move through grief instead of resisting it, we make space for healing to unfold.
Sensitivity is not weakness. It is a finely tuned instrument, an ancestral gift that tells us when something is wrong. Sensitivity is the reason some of us walk into a room and feel the energy shift before a word is spoken. It is the reason we can sense truth beneath the surface, the reason we carry the stories of those who came before us in the marrow of our bones.
Intuition is not paranoia. It is the oldest form of knowing. Women have been taught to distrust their instincts, to second-guess themselves, to seek permission before trusting what they feel in their gut. But intuition is the whisper of the earth, the echo of the grandmothers who walked before us. It is what keeps us safe. When we learn to trust ourselves again, we reclaim something that was stolen from us long ago.
The Weight of the Patriarchy: Why I Felt So Broken
I was not broken. I was never broken.
But as a teenager, I believed I was. I believed there was something deeply wrong with me, something that made me deserving of what had happened, something that explained why I felt like I was drowning in emotions too big to hold. The world around me told me I was too much, too angry, too unstable. No one said, Of course you feel this way. Of course you do.
Because it was never just about me.
The reason I felt so shattered was not because of an innate flaw in my personality. It was because I lived in a world where boys believed they had the right to take my sexuality as they pleased, to share it as they pleased, to punish me for what had happened as though I had chosen it. It was because girls and women, trained in the same system, joined in the punishment, shaming me for the abuse I had endured. I was made to feel that I was the problem, not the culture that had made this possible.
The anger I felt was huge, not just for myself but for the centuries of mistreatment my gender had faced at the hands of men. I could not name it at the time, but I could feel it, the collective rage of generations of women who had suffered as I had.
The Patriarchy’s Profits from Women’s Pain
This was not just about me. It never was. The world has been built on the exploitation, control, and suppression of women. The mistreatment of women is not an accident. It is a system that has benefited men for thousands of years.
• Women were burned at the stake as witches for knowing how to heal themselves and others.
• Women were locked in asylums for feeling too much, crying too much, or resisting their husbands.
• Women were given electroshock therapy, lobotomised, drugged into compliance.
• Women’s bodies were dissected without their consent, experimented on, used as test subjects for medical advances that never served them.
• Women were forced to bear children for their rapists, denied autonomy over their own bodies, called criminals for seeking freedom.
• Women were sterilised without their knowledge, their ability to have children stolen from them in secret medical procedures.
• Women were beaten and raped by their husbands, and told it was their duty to endure it.
• Women were denied access to education, to property, to wealth, to leadership.
• Women’s work was never paid, their labour expected, and after this slavery their contributions erased from history.
• Women’s pleasure was vilified, their bodies commodified, their desires repressed.
• Women were blamed for their own abuse, their own pain, their own oppression.
The world has taught men that women’s bodies belong to them. That women exist to serve them. That they are entitled to our space, our silence, our submission. And when women resist, when we show our rage, when we demand to be heard, the world finds a way to pathologise us, to convince us that we are the ones who are unstable, unwell, unreasonable.
No wonder I struggled with attachments. How could I trust anyone when I had been betrayed by people who were supposed to protect me? My teachers, the police, even my parents, all blamed me for what happened to me.
No wonder I felt anger and sadness so deep I thought it would swallow me whole, that I would never stop feeling it.
No wonder I learned to dissociate, to leave my body, when living inside it was a terrifying place to be.
Women have been taught to leave themselves because the world has made it so dangerous to exist inside their own skin.
Patriarchy and Psychiatry: The Perfect Combination for Silencing Women
When the world did not know how to control women, it burned us as witches.
When the world did not know how to silence women, it locked us in asylums.
When the world did not know how to stop women from fighting back, it drugged us, labelled us, cut pieces out of our bodies, or simply told us we were crazy.
The diagnostic manual of psychiatry was written by men. The same men who, for centuries, decided that a woman’s suffering was not a sign that the world was broken, but that she was. The same men who invented hysteria, who declared that women were mad for being passionate, angry, sexual, rebellious, creative, ambitious, independent.
The easiest way to keep a woman quiet is to convince her she is insane.
For centuries, men have rewritten our stories, erased our history, and convinced us that our rage, grief, and intuition are signs of madness instead of signs of life, survival, and deep, embodied wisdom.
And so, like so many before me, I believed them.
I believed that the reason I felt the way I did was because I was broken, not because I was awakening to the truth of how the world had hurt me, how it had hurt women for thousands of years. I believed that I was too much, not that the world was afraid of how powerful I could be if I trusted myself again.
But now I see it for what it is.
Reclaiming My Rage, My Body, My Power
I am not broken. I never was.
My emotions are not symptoms. They are sacred messengers.
My rage is not hysteria. It is righteous, necessary, holy.
My grief is not depression. It is the remembrance of everything we have lost.
My intuition is not paranoia. It is the wisdom of generations of women who came before me, whispering in my bones.
I refuse to see my emotions as problems to be fixed. I refuse to see my body as something to escape. I refuse to believe that I was ever the problem, when the truth is that I was simply waking up to the world as it really is.
Women have been leaving themselves for too long. It is time to return.
To our bodies.
To our rage.
To our grief.
To our pleasure.
To our knowing.
It is time to reclaim what was stolen.
Next: Returning to the Body
In the next section, we will explore the healing practices that help us reconnect with the parts of ourselves that have been silenced. We will look at how somatic healing, decolonising mental health, and community care can guide us back home to ourselves.
Alternative Approaches to Healing
Rather than relying on diagnosis and medication as the only pathways to healing, there are ways to reconnect with the body and its innate intelligence.
• Somatic healing focuses on working with the body rather than against it. Trauma is often held physically, and practices such as breathwork, movement, and nervous system regulation can help process emotions that words alone cannot reach.
• Decolonising mental health involves recognising how intergenerational trauma and systemic oppression contribute to emotional distress. It means rejecting the idea that suffering is always an individual problem and understanding that many struggles are rooted in larger societal structures.
• Community care offers an alternative to the isolation of diagnosis-based treatment. Many cultures have long understood that healing happens in connection with others. Instead of sending people away to deal with their pain alone, community care provides spaces where people can be seen, held, and supported without shame.
Healing does not always mean fixing. Sometimes, it means remembering. It means listening to what our emotions are telling us rather than silencing them. It means trusting that what we have been taught to fear, the depth of our feeling, the wildness of our nature, is not madness, but medicine.
Trusting the Wisdom of Our Wild Medicine
“Can we return to the knowing in our blood, flesh, and bones?”
For generations, women have been conditioned to fear their own depth. Their emotions have been framed as excessive, their intuition dismissed as irrational, and their bodies treated as unpredictable, dangerous, or in need of control. The natural rhythms of feeling, sensing, and knowing have been labelled as madness, disorder, or instability. But these were never the problem.
For centuries, systems of power have relied on severing women from their own truth. Psychiatry, religion, and the structures of patriarchy have turned feminine wisdom into something to be cured, controlled, or eradicated. The suppression of women’s voices and bodies has been a tool of oppression, reinforcing the narrative that to feel deeply is to be broken, that to resist is to be unstable.
The world has profited from this disconnection, thriving on the belief that women’s emotions and instincts are problems to be fixed rather than wisdom to be honoured. But the body remembers. The knowing in the blood, flesh, and bones remains intact, waiting to be reclaimed.
Reconnection is not an intellectual process but an embodied return. Holding grief allows healing to unfold rather than be buried beneath a diagnosis. Allowing rage to exist without shame transforms it from destruction to clarity. Honouring intuition restores trust in the body’s signals, moving from self-doubt to deep knowing.
The world is shifting. More women are rejecting the labels forced upon them and recognising that their emotions were never disorders. They are acts of survival, acts of remembering. To reclaim this knowing is to reclaim power. The return to wild medicine has already begun.
Holding Space for What We Have Been Taught to Fear
We are at a threshold. A choice. We can either continue the cycle—silencing, suppressing, medicating—or we can begin to hold space for the parts of ourselves we were told to erase.
This is an invitation.
Can we trust our emotions instead of seeing them as something to fix?
Can we welcome our rage without apologising for it?
Can we let our grief move through us like a river instead of trying to dam it?
Can we honour the knowing in our gut, in our blood, in our bones?
Because the truth is: our wild medicine has never left us.
It has always been here, waiting for us to return to it.
This conversation is not just personal. It is collective. It is a movement of reclamation. If this resonates with you, here are ways to step into it:
• Share your story – Have you ever been diagnosed with a disorder when you were simply responding to trauma? Have you ever felt gaslit by the system that was meant to help you? If you feel safe, share your experience.
• Join the conversation – Engage with the work of @wayofthewildwoman, Drop the Disorder, and Dr. Jessica Taylor. These voices are leading the way in challenging the medicalisation of women’s pain.
• Support alternatives – Seek out trauma-informed care that honours emotions as valid responses rather than symptoms. Find spaces where your story is heard and your healing is not reduced to a label.
We are not broken.
We never were.
The world is waking up.
And we are remembering.
We have spent centuries being told that our emotions, our bodies, our wisdom are problems to be solved. We have been burned, locked away, drugged, and dissected. We have been rewritten by those who wished to erase us.
But the story is not over.
The words of women who refused to be silenced are still with us. The wisdom that was buried in our bones is rising. We are remembering, and in that remembering, we are becoming dangerous again, dangerous in our knowing, dangerous in our refusal to comply, dangerous in our willingness to reclaim what was stolen.
This poem is for every woman who was pathologised when she should have been believed. It is for every woman whose body was called defective when it was holding the deepest truth. It is for those who fought, for those who burned, for those who were told they were broken when they were only ever trying to survive.
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A Damsel in Diagnosis When the world did not know how to control her, They bound her wrists to wood, called the fire a cleansing, called her knowledge a crime. She rose in smoke, her name swallowed by the wind. When the world did not know how to silence her, They locked her behind doors that did not open, counted her ribs like tally marks, pressed their fingers to her pulse, timing the beats of her sorrow. Take this, They said. Drink this. Forget your name. She swallowed silence like a stone. When the world did not know how to stop her fighting, They took her body apart piece by piece, wrote madness into her medical records, named her womb the source of her suffering, cut it from her while she slept. They laid her on the table, laced her skin with cold metal. The light above her buzzed like an executioner. Her womb- a wound they could not cauterise. They cut. They cut. They cut. They called it progress. They called it science. They called it necessary. Hysterical, they said, as if it were scripture, as if it were fact, as if she had not been screaming in a language they refused to hear. But she was never broken. She was weeping, moaning, gnashing her teeth. She lingers in the marrow, in the muscle, in the mouth of every woman who has ever swallowed a scream. She is alive, writing her own name back into history.
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