Naomi Watts: "It's far too exhausting to be ashamed"

Shame – such a huge topic. Where do you even begin? The constant comparisons with others began for me during puberty. At twelve, I was sent to boarding school, just like my brother. There I lived with about 30 other girls, and I became acutely aware of how slowly I was developing. There was a partly open, partly unspoken competition among the girls: Who had the biggest breasts? Who stuffed tissues in their bra? Who had their period? Who had ever made out with someone? Who had pubic hair? We were like detectives trying to solve a murder. We talked about these things for hours, shaking with excitement. I was always the very last to reach a new milestone and was constantly afraid that the others would find out.

A race against childishness

At 14, I hadn't had a period yet. The only other girl who had was a friend of mine. Until one day, she came running up and shouted, "I've got it! It's here!" My heart sank. Was I now alone in the wide world? "No, you haven't!" I said. "I bet that's not true. Don't leave me!" - "Yes, I have!" she said. "Come and look!" She pulled me into a washroom and showed me her soaked sanitary pad, as we called it back then. "Oh my God, it's true," I said, as if I'd received terrible news. The sight of the pad filled me with panic: It meant I would never be desirable and had failed at becoming a woman! The coming-of-age party was in full swing, and I was the only one who hadn't received an invitation.

I thought, I absolutely have to become a part of all this somehow. So I did what I thought I had to do to become a member of the club: I bought a box of tampons, locked myself in the bathroom, and spent a good forty-five minutes trying to insert one into my not-yet-bleeding vagina. I wasn't on my period yet, but when I changed clothes or got out of the shower, I wanted the other girls to see the string and think I was one of them. In my experience, there's hardly anything about being a girl or a woman that isn't fraught with shame. Here are some things you can be ashamed of: not having a period yet, having too heavy a period, having a C-section, having an epidural, not breastfeeding, not having children or too many, not working enough or too much, being too girly or too off-putting, too wet or too dry, too skinny or too feminine, too ambitious or too lazy. Too slutty or too frigid. Caring too much about one's appearance or not enough... ugh!

The Silence of the Teenage Girls

Why did we keep so much secret from each other in our youth? I learned how to masturbate from Cosmopolitan and spent an entire summer reading smutty scenes in Sidney Sheldon books, but I would have been too embarrassed to talk about it with my friends. How much we could have told each other, how much we could have comforted each other, if we hadn't been so fixated on arbitrary developmental milestones, so obsessed with what it meant to be early or late, so scared.

Looking back now, I truly realize the irony of my time at boarding school. We spend the first part of our lives trying to appear more mature and older. And then at some point, that changes, and we ask ourselves instead: How can I look younger? How do I stay youthful? The feeling of always being the wrong age followed me to Hollywood, too. Why did I always feel too young or too old, but never quite right?

The first will be the last

For a long time, I was always the youngest person on set. Now I'm one of the oldest. Why, in decades of filmmaking, was I never exactly in the middle? For a long time, I was afraid to talk about menopause and secretly took hormones. I didn't even tell the people around me. Eventually, I tried to talk about it with my friends, making jokes about hormonal fluctuations and the like. This was a funny way of saying that I was going through menopause without saying it outright. However, whenever I did come out of hiding, my admission was often met with nervous laughter or something like, "Oh, don't be silly. It's way too early for menopause." Confirmation that my body had failed me. The sense of shame grew. It wasn't good for me to live like this.

Not being able to confide my fears and feelings in anyone was very distressing. I felt alone. Just as I had felt unable to speak openly about my infertility, now, a few years later, I felt as if I had to keep my menopausal struggles secret. It was like some kind of monster in the closet. I struggled with a shattered sense of self-worth: Could I still play leading roles? Menopause felt like not just the end of my period, but the end of everything: fertility, sexuality, joy in life—and my ability to honestly tell other people how I felt.

You shouldn't carry such a burden around with you all the time. For a long time, however, I didn't know how to explain why I was so sensitive and still didn't know what was wrong with me. (...) Fortunately, I'm less and less concerned about what people think of me these days. Maybe because I've realized that being ashamed is far too exhausting, and I simply don't want to expend the energy for it anymore. Being able to talk about my experiences with my friends and with Billy, who is very understanding, and eventually even publicly, has significantly reduced my feelings of shame. Since then, I can shrug my shoulders when confronted with the reality of menopause.

No more embarrassment and red cheeks

This became clear to me one day at the pharmacy. I filled a prescription for hormone therapy and a UTI medication, and also bought an over-the-counter ointment for yeast infections. While I was paying, the pharmacist suddenly announced over the loudspeaker: "Price check, please, row four, vaginal products." Oh my God, I thought, feeling exactly like I did as a teenager after buying tampons. The pharmacists were loudly arguing about the price of the Vagisil cream I wanted to buy, while a line formed behind me.

As I was about to leave, I noticed a father from my child's school. He hadn't spotted me yet, so I turned away, hoping he wouldn't speak to me now that the whole place knew I was having problems with my vagina. But no luck. "Naomi, good to see you! How are you?" he asked. Um, I think you know how I am, Ted. But what the heck? If he didn't know about the problems women face during menopause, maybe he should. "I'm fine, Ted, thanks," I said. "And with the medication, I'll feel even better. It was nice meeting you."

Brigitte

#Topics