endometriosis

Treating women like idiots has the additional consequence of making women less likely to report symptoms in general. It’s really exhausting

It’s National Infertility Awareness Week and this year’s theme is #FlipTheScript — the goal being to change the conversation about infertility.

My well-meaning friends would share how their ‘bad cramps’ were cured with birth control or yoga, and I’d feel like the failure with a low tolerance for pain. I’d sit in bed, between pain spells and wonder if my agony was an elaborate form of laziness designed to help me shirk the adulthood. The Bad Cramps Brigade meant to foster solidarity, was inadvertently gas-lighting me.

It had never occurred to me to visit [a Planned Parenthood].... And yet, in a culture where the rights and healthcare needs of people assigned female at birth are constantly under attack, it’s easy, even for someone like me, to have warped ideas about exactly what one will experience.

Prescribe, refer, repeat — that was the drill for several years. It wasn’t until I started to explore the impact of childhood adversity that I saw the big picture, and it began to make sense.

[CN: pregnancy, miscarriage] Plenty of period-positive activists point out that the beauty of menstrual blood is that it’s the only blood that doesn’t arise out of trauma. What we discuss less often is the ability of menstrual blood to induce trauma.

When I was first diagnosed with Stage IV endometriosis and told that my fertility had become a now or never proposition, I didn’t know anyone else who had faced anything similar. All of my friends were at the point of marrying and having babies themselves. Several had gotten pregnant without even meaning to. Meanwhile, I was 26 and single, being told that it might never happen for me at all. The whole thing was crushing, perhaps even more so because I didn’t feel like there was anyone I could talk to about it. My friends couldn’t relate, and even those who were most empathetic and anxious to help were often at a loss for what to say.