Womanhood is powerful. Woman are forces of nature. We ARE nature.
And yet, there’s something universal about being a woman and realizing that so much of our bodies we have to figure out on our own.
Did you know only about 5% of global research and development funding goes to women’s health?
Or that women were not legally required to be included in clinical trials until 1993?
We are fighting for advocacy in systems we helped build, yet they weren’t made to fit us in.
We learn to work through the pain, laugh off any symptoms, and second guess ourselves the second we are told “It’s all normal.”
Over the summer, I was diagnosed with endometriosis after a LONG history of appointments, scans, and open-ended “answers” that began to make me wonder if I was making it all up. Maybe this life I was living was normal, and I was just too weak to handle it?
Before I had my surgery, I wanted to back out. Not because I didn’t want answers, but because I was terrified of NO answer. What if the years of brushing it off was right, what if it was all in my head?
I feel so incredibly lucky to have been diagnosed so young, but the fact that I felt lucky to have such a debilitating diagnosis made me think about something bigger: why are women so often made to question their own minds and bodies before the healthcare system questions itself?
The more I learned about my own diagnosis, the more I started thinking about the bigger picture. Why do so many women become experts in their own symptoms simply because they have to? Why is so much of our experience with our bodies met with “that’s normal” before anyone looks around and asks whether it should be?
For me, the lack of research isn’t just about statistics or medical journals.
It’s about years of women wondering, worrying, and adapting to things they shouldn’t have to carry the weight of understanding on their own. It’s about how easily pain has become background noise for womanhood.
And I think it’s something important to start talking about. Not just how little we know, but how much more we deserve, as women, to know about our bodies.
It is so important as women that we stop letting our symptoms simply be blamed on hormones or just “normal pains.” We need to fight for more, because we deserve more.
After this summer, I’ve learned that I am so much stronger than I gave myself credit for. It’s time that that becomes a universal belief in women.
I believe in a world that believes in growth. A world that believes the women.
Our pain deserves answers. Our bodies deserve research. And our voices deserve to be heard.