I’ve Been Able to Hide the Excruciating Thing That Happens to Me Every Month From My Colleagues. That’s About to Become Really Difficult.

Good Job I can only mask the pain for a few hours. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Arnav Pratap Singh/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Good Job is Slate’s advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? Send it to Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir here. (It’s anonymous!) Dear Good Job, I suffer from really bad period pain. Each month, I basically have to take painkillers every four hours to slightly function for at least the first day and a half of my cycle. I have been remote for most of my work life and have found that working from home works really well for me during these times. At home, for example, I can contort myself into weird seating poses on the ground that help relieve my pain while I continue to work, take more breaks for deep breathing, or finish up work later into the evening. Now I’m returning to the office three times a week, and I’m honestly pretty worried. I don’t want to have to run to the bathroom to sit in pain several times a day when this hits (if it hits during an office day, and I’m sure eventually it will). It’s the full eight-hour day that’s haunting me. I could pretend at normalcy for a few hours, but it’s hard to mask the pain that long! Some months are better than others. Also, this is awkward as hell to talk to my male manager about, so I’m not even sure I should mention it. How do women get through this? —That Time of the Month Dear That Time of the Month, I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this pain. I hope you have good health care and have spoken with your provider about managing your symptoms. If not, please do, or try again. A treatable underlying condition could be the cause of your pain. You might benefit from “menstrual suppression,” using hormonal birth control or other techniques to delay, reduce, or eliminate periods. It may feel awkward to talk with your manager, but there are ways to make it less so. First, understand that good managers are typically the first and sometimes only people in a workplace to know about their direct reports’ health, family, or other personal problems. When someone is struggling with bereavement, the end of a relationship, a sick family member, mental or physical health issues, or anything else that disrupts their work, they start by telling their manager. Your manager, if he’s been around a while and has the trust of his direct reports, has heard some things. When and if you do speak with your manager, be straightforward, brisk, and use clinical language to make the discussion slightly more formal. If your period pain is caused by endometriosis or fibroids, use those words. If not, or if you’d rather not be specific, you can say you suffer from “dysmenorrhea,” the clinical term for severe period pain. Try not to sound embarrassed, because embarrassment can be contagious. Show that you expect your manager to handle the conversation professionally, and he’ll be more likely to do so. Ask for a simple accommodation of either working from home or leaving the office early on days when the pain becomes debilitating. If you don’t trust your manager or he doesn’t have the authority to allow unscheduled remote work, speak with human resources. If they refuse, mention that reasonable accommodations for severe period pain may be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. If it helps you approach the conversation with confidence, know that period shame is a public health and feminist issue. You might find some comfort from reading Gloria Steinem’s essay for Ms. Magazine in 1978 called “If Men Could Menstruate.” Here’s an excerpt: What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?The answer is clear—menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:Men would brag about how long and how much.Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties.Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Good Job, I have had the same email since high school. It’s my middle name and my last name. I go by my middle name and have since birth, as is tradition in my family since all of the women have the same first name. I have since gotten married and changed my last name to my husband’s name. When I went to register for a new email address (middle name and married last name), it was already taken! I resolved to just keep my original email account because I liked how clean it looked (no numbers or other superfluous marks). Now, I am job hunting, and I am worried automated systems may be flagging my email associated with applications as suspect since my email doesn’t match my legal name. Think: Frances Lanahan is applying using the email: scottiefitzgerald@gmail.com. Do you think this could be a valid issue? Would you recommend I just suck it up and get a new email to lessen confusion? I use my middle name in the file title of my resume and in the resume itself. I also sign all cover letters with “married name, née maiden name.” However, I’ve already spoken with some recruiters who were confused by the totally different names until I explained it, and I’m afraid of being weeded out over the mismatch before I get to speak to someone in a very tough job market. Any insight or experience would be greatly appreciated! —A Molehill as Big as the Ritz Dear A Molehill as Big as the Ritz, The recruiters you spoke with gave you a gift. There are many ways to be eliminated from a job search, and causing recruiters even a moment’s confusion could be enough to do it. You want them focused on your achievements, skills, and qualifications, not distracted by your name. Establish a second email account for professional correspondence that matches the name on your resume. It’s a bit of a hassle to monitor two inboxes, but separating your professional and personal emails can protect you from common mistakes as well. You’re less likely to miss an important message in your new account, where it’s not competing with notes from friends, newsletters, and spam. And you won’t accidentally auto-complete a recruiter’s name in your old account when you’re sending a goofy message to a loved one. The larger issue to think about, though, is who needs what information at what stage of the hiring process. If you have established a professional identity (via LinkedIn posts, press coverage, biographical blurbs from past events, etc.) under your original last name, you might want to use that rather than your newly married name on your resume and cover letter. The same thing goes for which name you choose as the first name on your resume. Recruiters may search your name before requesting an interview, so make it easy for them to confirm you are who you say you are. (If you go this route, stick with your current email account.) Once you get a job offer and start signing contracts, filling out tax forms, or signing up for benefits, tell your new employer (probably through an entirely different branch of human resources) your full legal name. You’re not being dishonest; plenty of journalists, actors, lawyers, and other people work under a professional name that may not match their driver’s license. One final bit of advice: If your application will benefit from both your birth name and married name, avoid “née.” It looks a little old-fashioned and calls attention to your gender and marital status, which could activate the implicit biases you have to overcome when you’re applying for a job. Your signature will look more impressive if you style yourself, as F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s daughter could have done: F. Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan. Sign up now for Slate Plus to read all of our Good Job columns for the week. Dear Good Job, My family member works in social media and marketing. Multiple times a week, they ask me to write positive reviews of businesses I have no experience with and comment on social media posts to generate engagement. I find these requests annoying, and frankly, I question how good they are at their job if they need to make such requests of their friends and family. Also, I think it’s a minor ethics issue to write a rave review of a business that I have no personal knowledge of. I think I have landed on this: I will write compliments on social media (e.g., “Great hairstyle” for a salon business; “Beautiful!” for a florist client) for the sake of preserving family peace despite the annoying requests, but I wish to stop writing reviews as a matter of ethics and honesty. I read reviews a lot when deciding whether to spend money on a product or service, and it really gives me the ick to participate in this. What say you? —Honest Opinions Only Dear Honest Opinions Only, On behalf of all of us who consult reviews, thank you for your integrity. I agree that it’s unethical (and ick) to write a fake review. It’s generous of you to make genuine comments on social media, as you’re doing. I suspect you’re right that your relative isn’t great at this job, and probably won’t have it for long. If they continue pressuring you to write reviews, tell them what you’ve told us: You read reviews yourself when you’re deciding what to spend money on, and you aren’t qualified to review these businesses. Then change the subject to something that’s likely to distract your family member: their favorite TV show, family gossip, or how AI is changing their profession. —Laura More Advice From Slate My wife returned to school to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse. I fully supported this, even though it meant taking on additional student loans. She loves her work. For years, my mother-in-law told my wife she intended to pay off these student loans as a gift. I had my doubts, so I never counted on her generosity. We are super frugal, so the numbers always balance out. My skepticism ended up being valid because the promised help never came. I always assumed my mother-in-law’s financial situation changed and she was too embarrassed to admit it. So I was shocked when she recently offered to give us the money for a shockingly expensive vacation package to Disney World instead of paying off the debt… Advice Workplace Jobs