In the corner of the girls’ restroom, there is a tin box screwed onto the wall. Its ominous shadow looms over me and any other person who has dared to use it. 

No one ever does, though. This box is locked, and money is the key to accessing the menstrual hygiene items inside. 

I never have loose change on me, so if my cycle unexpectedly arrived, I’d have to work up the nerve to ask other people for the products I need. I eventually always find them, but what about other folks? 

The existence of this tin box (and others like it) leaves a baffling residue on my mind: Why are period products so inaccessible at times? And why am I so mortified to ever acknowledge that I am going through a perfectly normal biological process?

When I place my experience within a broader frame, it jars me to the brutal reality that, while asking around for a spare pad or tampon is unpleasant, it is nowhere close to the experiences of girls living in poverty in the U.S. and around the world.

My mom would always tell me stories about growing up in Vietnam. She was born and raised in Saigon. Congested with aging buildings that slumped over and motorbikes that spewed gray smoke, Saigon was not the best area to grow up in. But it was home. 

With its endless vendor carts and alleyways that zigzagged through the heart of the city, Saigon was a special place that my mom grew up in. But it was also a place ravaged by war and its aftershocks. The Vietnam War had left the already struggling city of Saigon in shambles, leaving many of its residents, including my mom, in extreme poverty.  

For six years, starting from when she was 14 to when she was 20, my mom reused old cotton fabric because that was all that she had. Each day of her period, she folded rectangular sheets of tattered fabric and sewed it onto her clothes. And at the end of each day, she removed the stitches that she sewed in. Then she hand washed the stained fabric for reuse. 

It pains me to think of the lengths that folks like my mom went through to secure a small sliver of menstrual hygiene. It also makes me think of all the other girls in the world who have had similar experiences. 

Globally, period stigma disempowers women as their embarrassment about a normal biological process ensnares itself into the core of their identity. For example, in Nepal, menstruating women are seen as impure by their community and banished to huts during their cycles. 

These observations have led me to believe that menstrual hygiene should not be stigmatized or deemed as an “unnecessary luxury.” It should be a right to which every person who menstruates is entitled to. 

Instead of having tin boxes that lock away essential items, we should do more to address period poverty by providing free emergency menstrual products in schools, prisons and women’s shelters.

And instead of shaming people for going through a normal biological process, we should empower and equip them with the tools they need to succeed.