Bloodlines

There’s a quiet inheritance that moves through the women in a family.

Bloodlines began as a letter to my mother and became a reflection on the unspoken transmissions that pass between generations: beauty, shame, silence, resilience. It explores menstruation, aging, and the body as both archive and battleground — a site where love, loss, and social expectation converge.

Excerpt

Today, my body prepared a cradle
For a life that never came.
Oestrogen and progesterone
Wove a nest of hope,
Only to unravel it in red threads.

Each month, this ritual repeats—
A cycle of creation and loss,
Of potential unfulfilled,
Of a self not yet claimed.

My body weeps for a life not yet mine—
For freedoms deferred,
For choices unmade,
For autonomy surrendered
To scripts written by others.

Each drop a lament
For the liberty I have yet to grasp.

In this piece, I use blood as a metaphor for lineage — the flow of bodily and emotional knowledge passed from mother to daughter. The work moves through cycles of menstruation and menopause, linking them to ideas of autonomy, memory, and inherited silence.

Bloodlines is part of my ongoing exploration of feminist embodiment and sensory storytelling — how the body remembers, how it resists, and how it can reclaim its voice through texture, rhythm, and ritual.