Junel- more like my personal Junhell

There are so many different options out there as a woman for birth control that you can try. There’s the pill, the IUD, the ring, and the implant, just to name a few. If only there were that many options for men! (But that’s a whole other can of worms we won’t open in this post). Today we’ll be focusing on the pill that so many women take daily. Birth control can be a taboo subject, I know. But here’s the story of me and that darn fricken little pill.

I grew up in a Christian household, where birth control meant sex, and sex meant hell, so it was never even a topic of conversation. I had to depend on other sources outside of my parents if I ever wanted to learn about what it even was. I was homeschooled during middle school my health class consisted of my mom handing me a book about abstinence and dedicating myself to Christ. It was alright though, because birth control and other things in that realm were of no interest to me until I was older. Unfortunately, following all that religious trauma, when I finally was ready to learn I turned to my friends for advice but alas! My friends’ experiences were also intensely negative. Nights of gossip about boys quickly turned into horror stories of the pill and how “it made me gain 20 pounds!” or “I had my period for a whole month” and even “It made me cry every day.” The thing that always perplexed teenage me was that even though their experiences sounded terrible (and you would think they would never ever touch the stuff again), they kept at it.

It wasn’t until this past summer that I, at 21 years old, decided to pop my my birth control cherry and go on the pill. I know what you’re thinking (because it’s what my parents thought when I told them too) and no I wasn’t going on it for ~sexual~ reasons. Although that would’ve been a much easier explanation, that wasn’t the case for me. I was going on it for much more ~innocent~ reasons. Because my period was an inconsistent nightmare that had been slowly killing me for the past 10 years, I decided it was time to try birth control to alleviate the pain. All the horror stories aside, I was lucky enough to have an older sister who I witnessed go through many different types of birth control. So the stubborn, competitive, little sister complex in me thought, “I can do that…easy. I’ll be fine.” Oh boy was I wrong.

My doctor prescribed me a simple iron based pill called Junel. I was instructed to take it every day at the same time, and that my period would start exactly a month after I started it. Sounded easy enough to me. I put a daily reminder on my phone labeled “🙅🏻‍♀️🤰🏻🙅🏻‍♀️🤰🏻” and went on my merry way. 5 p.m. every day, no matter where I was, my reminder would go off and I would take that baby blue baby out of it’s plastic case and in my mouth it would go. All seemed fine, the only inconvenience was the two seconds it took to physically take the pill. Week 3 was where things changed drastically.

First thing I noticed is that I stopped having much of an appetite. I didn’t fret though, it seemed normal to me because I wasn’t expelling a lot of energy being stuck at home in quarantine. But then came the waves of nausea. Morning and night I would be hit by it, inevitably ending with me running to the bathroom to throw up. And then came the crying. It became a routine. I would wake up every morning, sick. My mom would make me some tea and because I was so grateful for her and the tea I was overcome with emotion and would cry. Then I would go watch television, but every show or movie I would attempt to distract myself with would make me sob. I finally discovered that only thing I could successfully watch without crying was Architectural Digest celebrity house tour videos on Youtube. Usually I felt better by the afternoon, but the nausea would come back later in the evening with a vengeance. This continued for a whole week until one final morning I was crying (once again) because I was convinced the boy I was dating hated me so I was planning on breaking up with him. I opened my eyes mid sob to see my mom and the look on her face was the wake up call I needed to get off of Junel. Once I was off it, my mood changed drastically. I stopped throwing up and I just felt… lighter. I was so much happier. Then my doctor prescribed me another version of the pill, this time more progesterone based. I opened my phone and turned my birth control notifications back on. Here we go again…

I’m still on my birth control journey, figuring out slowly but surely what works for me. I share this story not because it was an unpleasant experience (I still can’t quite believe I didn’t get off of Junel sooner), but because talking about birth control should not be an uncomfortable subject. Women go on birth control for many different reasons, but since sex is often a reason the subject has become taboo in many circles. I am grateful that I have the privilege to have access to birth control and a stable environment to try it in. I am still learning and I hope my experience sheds a relatable light!