This piece is about my own experience of the contraceptive pill, and how it changes the way I relate to my body in the world and as part of nature. Lots of people relate to the moon what with their menstrual cycles and ‘natural’ rhythms which reflect the moon and its waxing and waning, but for me personally, my ‘moon cycle’ is totally static and man-made, as I have to stay on the pill due to my medical condition.
When I look at the piece, what I initially think is the natural bumps and craters of the moon is in fact multiple, empty plastic medicine packets – paracetamol, ibuprofen, and the contraceptive pill. Rather than a plastic-filled ocean, I’m looking up at this plastic moon.

Often when we think about the moon, we think about consistency and change all in one. When you see it up in the sky in all its beauty and shiny roundness, part of why it’s lovely is that you know it won’t be the last time you see it. It moves the tides of the ocean, which are different all the time, but also remain consistent in some ways. Illness is not this linear thing of ill>treatment>better, it’s this weird waxing and waning thing, like the tides, and some days are good, and some days are bad, and we do our very best to manage, to ride the waves.

There are so few things in medicine which are ‘quick fixes’, and most of the time it’s all about optimising the management and accepting that we might have to take a medication every single day for the next few months, or years, or forever. And some of those medications will change your life, change what your every-day looks like, the texture of normal.

So, there’s this funny consistency, this one thing that you will do every single day, and still illness is unpredictable and your life will change around you, but there’s a few things that stay the same, like pills, and the moon in the sky.

Rhiannon Shaw,  iBAMH medical student, Bristol, 2024