I saw the bruises, the burns, the cuts – I knew which ones had been done to you by someone you thought you could trust. Someone you thought loved you. I knew which ones you gave yourself.
I loved you when I left you.
This is for the kids who know that the worst kind of fear isn’t the thing that makes you scream, but the one that steals your voice and keeps you silent.
When I became too much myself, I had to change my life.
I was the problem and the solution.
In the face of scary things, knowledge was always a comfort to me. No matter what the subject was, if I could find a book or two about it, I could squash any anxiety that it might provoke. As my heroine Scully once said, “The answers are there, you just have to know where to look.
In retrospect, that was the moment I realized my ignorance was going to exacerbate whatever the problem was, and that I had to prescribe myself some kind of medical education, at least as it pertained to my situation.
I was not a ghost. I was a little girl with needs and wants and allergies. Still, I hung soundlessly, as weightlessly as I could, in the air. The living can haunt a house, too.
So often we think that the truth is a static entity that exists only in a singular place – a place that we have to find. But I have come to realize that the answers I have been looking for, the truth of my own body, was ever-changing.
Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that’s a place to start. That’s where the hope is.
Where a woman is in her menstrual cycle also influences how her body metabolizes, well, anything. Researchers know this: that’s why, when they do include women in trials, they design the research so that women will be participating early in their cycles, when their hormones are most similar to a man’s. Periods, then, have become something of an exclusionary pathology.
In other words, we really don’t know how many people have endometriosis, and why we don’t has far less to do with a lack of scientific research and advancement than with our antiquated belief systems and power structures. But it’s not even that we don’t understand endometriosis on a population level: we can’t even seem to get it right with just one patient.
Every experience that reaffirmed I had known happiness, and had been capable of love, was wroth grasping for.