 My first period was hellish. I just remember feeling utterly uncomfortable. I was having to change pad once every couple of hours and at 14 that should have alerted somebody that something was wrong. But no, I got made to feel guilty for spending so much money on sanitary wear. We were the poor family on the council estate. I was at the school, which was a village school, so I would use toilet paper from the school toilets. Until I left home, every period, I spent worrying that people would smell me. And that was the shame in it, the smell. It's one of the reasons I'm great to have a chat with you because I don't want anybody else going through this. Now when I left home, I was in charge of my own budget. But even then, I'd run out and still I wouldn't go and buy more because I'd got this inbred guilt. So again, it was back to the toilet roll in the knickers. It's taken years of therapy for me to realise that actually I do deserve nice things and I shouldn't really be thinking of sanitary products as nice things. I always felt like outside of mainstream society because I wasn't finding people whose experiences matched mine, even though I was sure they must be out there. I couldn't go swimming and that sounds really odd, doesn't it? I couldn't tell people why I couldn't swim. I was constantly hypervigilant. In the late 80s, we had this fashion for like skirts that just came on the knee. Constantly, like surreptitiously as I thought, like checking to see if there was any leakage. So my period as well as the pain led to embarrassment, led to withdrawal, so I was self-isolating. I would tell my younger self anytime someone says, are you on your period? Call them on it. I would say, speak up and when they don't listen, speak louder because this isn't right, this isn't normal. To me, a period proud of Wales means freedom. It means freedom for people to achieve their potential. It means freedom from shame. It means freedom from ever having to undergo that discomfort, that isolation.