I Am the Conquerer of My Own Crises

by Camilla Lowell

Say you have an important, pre-work breakfast meeting.

Say you wake up early, pick out a cute breakfast meeting outfit, and haul two bags of clothes (you’re starting a cat-sitting gig tonight), plus your work tote, to the subway without (visibly) sweating on your cute outfit (it helps that the outfit is a black sleeveless dress). Say you realize, as you’re walking out of the subway, that you forgot to bring tampons. No, scratch that: Say you realize that though you are definitely bleeding freely from the vagina, you did not put a tampon in this morning. How did you forget to do this? You don’t know. But you did!

It’s now about 7:45 a.m. Say you get to work, stash your bags of clothes in filing cabinets, go into the bathroom and discover, one, that all that is on offer in the lady supply closet are enormous maxi pads, and, two, that your cute dress has a gigantic slit up the back which you did not notice. Sexy? Yes! Breakfast meeting appropriate? No. Say you decide to use the maxi pad, and re-purpose a binder clip to seal the slit. Say both of those solutions immediately prove unworkable. Say, it’s now 8 a.m., your breakfast meeting is in half an hour, and you’re dressed inappropriately and wearing what feels like a diaper.

If you’re in an Aaron Sorkin television show, presumably this is the part where a man swoops in, because ladies are always in desperate need of rescue. Maybe you lock yourself on a roof with a man who has been gently stalking you (“trying to win you over”). Or maybe you start to have a panic attack and a man who was once embedded with some Marines tells you how to breathe. Later in the day, Josh probably shows up holding your underwear. (That might actually genuinely be funny.)

But thankfully, you’re not! So you go to Duane Reade and buy a sewing kit ($4.99) and tampons ($2.79). You duck into the bathroom, close the offending slit and, you know, do the thing that you do with a tampon, and walk to your breakfast meeting. You show up two minutes early. It goes pretty well, you think.

Camilla Lowell is definitely not a pseudonym being used by a person who is worried that her co-workers will know that “breakfast meeting” is code for “interview.”

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