I Don't Always Feel Like a Warrior
You do not have to feel like a warrior today for it to still be true that you are one.
I have been thinking about the word warrior.
It is what we call women with endometriosis: the Endo Warrior. It sounds fierce and brave and empowered, and most days I feel exactly the opposite of those things. I know it is meant to encourage, and in a way it does. But I keep coming back to the same question: why do women with endometriosis have to be warriors in the first place?
I was diagnosed in December 2017 after emergency surgery.
A cyst had ruptured in my abdomen. I did not know it existed until the moment it made itself impossible to ignore. It was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life up to that point, the kind that removes all other thought and leaves only the single consuming fact of it.
In a follow up appointment with my surgeon after the surgery, she confirmed what the procedure had revealed: endometriosis.
Because my mother also has it, the word was not unfamiliar to me. Hearing it said about my own body was something else entirely. It rocked my world.
What rocked it even more was the math. Prior to that surgery I had been suffering for fifteen years. Fifteen years of bad periods and terrible pain, of being put on birth control because that is what you do, because that is what everyone does. It helped a little, but for a young teenager trying to navigate her own body, already naive about what was happening inside her and why, it was a lot to carry without ever really understanding what she was carrying.
Fifteen years. One ruptured cyst. One emergency surgery. One follow-up appointment. And finally, a name for it.
The years since that diagnosis have been a lot.
A second emergency surgery in December 2020, this one worse than the first and happening in the middle of a pandemic, which added its own particular layer of fear and isolation to an already frightening experience. More healing and recovery to face, and more fricking doctors appointments.
Josh and I looked into IVF. We considered what it would mean to try to build a family, and whether that was something my body could hold. The answer, after everything we went through to find it, was that the pain was still too great. That door closed in a way that was not dramatic or sudden but quiet and heavy, the kind of closing that takes time to grieve.
I eventually found a specialist at UVA. I got on medication that helped. I started paying more attention to the things I could control: exercise, food, rest, all the ordinary things that add up to something. And things did get better.
But better is not the same as resolved. Better can change quickly and without warning. I cannot see what is happening inside my own body, and that not-knowing sits with me in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it. You can look completely fine on the outside and be telling an entirely different story underneath. You can have a good week and not trust it fully because you have learned not to. You can feel like yourself and know that the feeling is not a guarantee.
That is its own kind of exhausting, separate from the pain itself.
Endometriosis touches everything, including this business.
There are days when I want desperately to be in the studio and my body simply will not cooperate. The ideas are alive, the motivation is real, and I am stuck, not from lack of will but from a body making its own decisions. Those days bring a particular guilt with them, an anger at myself for something I did not choose and cannot fully control. It’s not the pain, but the anger at myself for the pain. That might be the hardest part.
So no. I do not always feel like a warrior.
Some days I just feel like a woman trying to get through a Tuesday, doing her best with what she has, which on some days is not very much. But I am learning, slowly, to call that enough.
Maybe that is what a warrior actually looks like. Not fierce and fearless and somehow above it all, but still here, still showing up, and still fighting for herself even on the days when fighting is the wrong word for what she is actually doing. It’s more like surviving, which is sometimes everything.
If you are living with endometriosis, I see you. You are not alone in this. You do not have to feel like a warrior today for it to still be true that you are one.