Who is LAURA?
A great question - and one I still ask myself regularly.
It has taken me a long time to even just begin to learn who I really am and I genuinely believe that it is never something that we fully figure out.
We are always changing and evolving and growing - but part of what helped me to understand myself was connecting back to my body.
I spent over 15 years taking the contraceptive pill which meant that I did not have a period at all. It took me until I was in my late twenties before I learned what a menstrual cycle was including the words follicular and luteal which I’d never even heard of (and which are apparently not even recognised by this website platform…).
It was only when my mood became so erratic and low that I eventually made the decision to stop taking the pill and do something about it.
So I taught myself. Literally everything I have learned over the last five years has been a combination of curiosity and sheer determination to learn what I should have been taught when I was 10 - before I started bleeding.
I started off reading books and attending online workshops which completely blew my mind when I learned more and more about my body including the full extent of my clitoris. I couldn’t believe how much hormones affect our day to day lives and why we still aren’t speaking about it.
I eventually went on to train with Red School - pioneers in the field of menstruality - and completed their three month Menstruality Leadership Programme in 2024. This opened my eyes to a whole other world of menstrual cycle awareness and has become the foundation of what I teach today.
Following on from that, I started thinking about why sex education in schools continues to be so inadequate and, with an early career background working with children and young people, I thought that maybe working in schools was the way to go. I trained with acetUK to become a qualified sex educator and realised that school education is still so restricted and I started to question why…
That’s when I realised that it is the adults I need to be speaking to, not the children.
If the teachers and the parents and the policy makers and the education board don’t understand their own bodies - why would they prioritise teaching the children about theirs?!
I think it is incredible that topics such as menopause are now being more widely discussed but the reality is that menopause is actually the end of the journey for a cycling woman and there are potentially 40+ years of menstruation leading up to that point. That’s the part I really want to speak about.
That’s before we even get started on pleasure…
But I will leave it there for now - a ‘brief’ introduction to me and why I embarked on this journey.
It’s a pleasure to have you here, period.
Photographer: Smile with Kelly
Watch my TEDx Talk
It still blows my mind that I can even say this (and it already doesn’t even feel real that I actually did it) but my TEDx talk is a journey of identity and how I got to the point I’m at today…
