The summer night that Bàrbara Mestanza felt like a woman for the first time

When Bàrbara Mestanza was a teenager, she was "obsessed with her period". "I was fifteen and still hadn't gotten it. I remember changing and the other girls looking at me strangely, I had no breasts, no pubic hair, nothing. I had been going to the doctor for two years to see if there was any problem, and they always said the same thing, it will come. Meanwhile, I prayed every night to wake up the next day and have grown breasts".

On Saint John's Eve, when she had turned fifteen, she went out with a friend in Barcelona's Olympic Village. "It's something I would never do now, but back then there were bonfires on the beach and a great atmosphere. It was a very fun night where I got drunk for the first time in my life," recalls Mestanza. At five in the morning she returned home and woke up a few hours later feeling very unwell. "I thought I had messed up by getting drunk, that maybe I was going into an alcoholic coma".

But no, when she went to the bathroom she discovered the origin of the pain: her period had finally come! "I didn't get my period until I had a good drunk and relaxed. It's a lesson I've had to learn several times in life: sometimes things happen to me when I forget that I want them to happen. Forgetting, in this case, was getting drunk," explains the playwright.

That first period, she says, lasted two very long weeks, but she lived them with excitement. "For me, getting my period was the starting signal for many other things: adult life, sexual relations... I was very bothered by the thought that I would break my hymen before getting my period. When it came, I spent years celebrating it internally. I remember the girls complaining about their periods in class, and I, even now, when I feel the pain of my period, I also feel happiness".

As an adult, she explains that her period disappeared again after a while of taking birth control. "I was with one of those idiotic guys who say that with a condom they don't slip. I wanted to get my period back and it didn't come until I forgot about it: it was during the premiere of my first play at the Teatre Lliure. I was in a completely nude scene and 300 people saw me bleed live: they must have thought it was fake".

“It’s a bit strange what I’ve told you – asks Mestanza–? Really waking up and having my period was one of the best summer nights of my life: I felt like a woman for the first time,” she claims.