Renuka Shahane, a prominent figure in Marathi cinema, recently revealed that she started menstruating at the age of 10. During a podcast discussing taboos around menstruation, she talked about how this early experience affected her, causing her to feel ashamed and hide her body for years after that.
During the podcast We Are Yuvaa, Renuka shared, “I got my periods when I was 10. Imagine, I am 58 today and I have lived most of my life with periods. I have enjoyed my childhood physiologically for a very little time. At such age, you have not developed that much in terms of brain to understand what is happening to your body. I was lucky because in my case, my mom drew a diagram to explain how this works. I was lucky because at my home, they used to discuss all this very openly. But, I couldn’t really understand what was happening and why. All I knew is this is not something bad or I am not suffering. I was assured of these things.”
She recalled that none of her classmates or friends had started their periods when she did. This made her feel isolated because she couldn’t discuss it with anyone for three years until her friends also experienced it. She recalled, “Nobody in my school had periods, at least in my class. None of my friends had. So, I had to wait until they got their periods to share things. For them, it was three years later. For that period of time, I was feeling very lonely. You feel like you cannot speak about this to anyone. Luckily, I could speak about it to my mom. But, it does have some kind of impact on you psychologically also that you are also becoming bigger in ways that nobody is aware of. Nobody is talking about it in the school.”
Renuka played Madhuri Dixit’s elder sister in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!
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