All the Lies I Told On Instagram
If captions were chronically honest…
At some point, I realized I was your everyday social media hypocrite. My work on endometriosis consists of a lot of talking, writing, and educating — and yet when you scroll through my Instagram feed, you see no trace of my own battle. How am I helping my own cause if I’m not practicing the destigmatization I preach? I called myself out on this recently and decided to do one tiny thing: post the yellow endometriosis awareness ribbon in the captions of the photos taken on miserable days. Off I went scrolling, looking for lies. These are my favorites, in no particular order.
England, last fall. Oxford, London, reunions, and very bad timing.
Here I am with my high school bff. “Celebrating 14 years of friendship”, the caption says. More like, “celebrating finally taking a shit”. Fun fact: endometriosis never comes alone, it has at least one more condition that tags along, out of which irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common one. On top of that, because the colon is so close to your reproductive organs, it often gets endometrium-like tissue stuck to it. The result: constipation around ovulation and during PMS. I spent my time in Oxford exploring the city, catching up on gossip, excessively doing sit ups in hopes of making my bowels move, and spending hours on the toilet trying to give birth to some feces.
Here I am in London a couple of days later, with empty bowels and new problems. Caption says something “hilarious” about me replacing Jody Whittaker. In reality you see a fangirl ovary-acting. My darling friend Judy prepared a whole list of activities we were going to pack in my week in London, but my body had other plans. I started flaring up. This photo shows me with a big grin on my face, while in reality I was as miserable as they get — and stubborn. I proclaimed I would rather die than leave London without my TARDIS photo. I couldn’t think of a bigger tragedy! I spent most of the day in bed, with Judy doing her best to make me comfortable. The fact I eventually got up and went half way across the city to see the blue box and take this photo was an act of sheer will and Doctor Who fanaticism.
Ugly truth time? On my feed, you can find a beautiful series of pictures taken in the frozen Rockies, on the first romantic trip I took with my then-boyfriend. The fact I had endo belly and could feel my inner organs swelling up made the romancing very stressful. It was a new relationship, so I felt huge pressure to suck it up and stick it out. But there’s no place for that kind of thing when telling the Internet your love story, is there?
Pigtailed world travelers know no bad days. Their lives are perfect. Unless they have endo. PMDD is a shamefully under researched condition. The little research that has been done has shown that it’s another condition tied to endometriosis, because why not. There’s not much out there on the connection other than statistics and speculation. It feels like being sucked into a black hole and getting swallowed up by sadness. Thankfully, a friend dragged me out of that month’s episode to go visit the stunning Buu Long Pagoda. This trip, too, was cut short by a flare up.
Chronically ill and chronically fabulous! The only photo of my endo belly out there. “You’re so skinny, don’t be stupid”, everyone always says when I complain about my “baby bump”. This is annoying, because most of the time the whining is actually about the discomfort of your skin being so stretched out and the feeling of carrying around a watermelon. That evening, it was about both. I had just bought a new skin tight dress, it was my bff’s birthday party, and we had plans for a wild night out; but suddenly, I was “fat”. This is not advisable, but I chose to wear the dress anyway and get so drunk I’d forget about both endo and the belly. These pics (highly staged for best bump coverage, I admit) came out in a moment of vodka-self-empowerment.
Stressed and depressed, but very well dressed! Here’s me last month, in full hair, make up and costume, filming a project with dear friends that I was so deeply invested in. That’s also me on the edge of a break down. As it often goes in life, due to some conflicts in schedules etc, the live-audience filming was pushed to what I like to call “the danger week”. The thought of my period making me miss the shooting had me frantic for days! “Are you going to ruin this for me like you do everything else,” I talked to my ovaries furiously, “are you?!” Here’s a photo of me slaying the stage, stuffed with ketoprofen, feeling my uterus turning into an exploding volcano. Between takes I wore a fur coat to be fabulous and a heating pad to survive. But I did it. I don’t know if I’m more proud or exhausted looking back at that day’s photos.
Whoever you are who’s reading this, statistics say that there are women in your life fighting this fight next to you. You can help by making them feel safe to not be alright all the time. You can help by getting yourself informed, so that you can better understand us and how we function. We don’t ask for your pity, or extra privileges. We ask to be seen. We ask to be acknowledged. Most of all, we ask for proper medical treatment and support in our centuries-long fight against gender-bias in medicine.
And if it’s you reading this, endo sister, the best thing you can do is be louder. Show your wounds with no shame, and keep fighting the good fight!
