(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

What’s charting? It’s a person taking and keeping notes about their menstrual and fertility cycles. Those notes may be as little information as what days you get your period, may have more information, like what kind of flow you had and what discharges you experienced that month, or have just about anything and everything you can think of that does or may have something to do with your fertility cycle: your basal temperatures (a vaginal temp you take daily with a thermometer made for that purpose), your libido, your sleep patterns, the whole works. What information you include depends on what you want to observe, and what your needs in charting are.

When you hear about people charting their periods or overall fertility cycles, it’s usually either about trying to conceive or using natural family planning (NFP or FAM) as a primary method of birth control. Many of you are not trying to conceive, and for younger people, NFP isn’t a sound sole or primary method for you either because your cycles are still all over the place or because you’re also using condoms to help prevent sexually transmitted infections.

But charting your cycles doesn’t have to be about natural family planning. Even if you’re not trying to become pregnant, or aren’t looking to use charting as a primary method of birth control, there are a bunch of reasons charting can be a big benefit to you.

Because there’s nothing innately mysterious about a body, and the last person it should be a mystery to is the person whose body it is.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here!