The Her Edit

There is a particular kind of pain that women are taught not to name.

It begins early. We are girls when we first learn that the body will ache, and that the aching is simply the cost of being female. We hear it in hushed tones from women who were told the same. Cramping. Heaviness. Clotting. We learn to fold it into the ordinary, to carry on, to say I’m fine through a tight jaw because that is what we watched our mothers do.

So when the pain grows, we rarely sound the alarm. We have already been taught that this is what it means to live in this body.

This is the story Lupita Nyong’o told the world. And it is why she is the first woman in our Health edition of Women Worth Watching.

In 2014 — the same year she stood on a stage and accepted an Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave — Lupita was quietly contending with something else entirely. While the world celebrated her, she was exhausted, pre-anaemic, and in a monthly pain she had long assumed was normal. She has spoken about growing up taught that once your period begins, you should simply expect to hurt; that the bleeding, the clotting, the discomfort were all just part of being a woman. So she didn’t question it. She carried on.

It was only when a routine check-up led to an ultrasound that the truth arrived: around thirty uterine fibroids, growing silently along the walls of her uterus.

She had surgery to remove them. And then, more than a decade later, they returned; this time more than fifty, the largest the size of an orange. The same two options she had been offered before were offered again. Surgery, or live with the pain.

What makes Lupita worth watching is not that she suffered. It is what she chose to do with the suffering.

Rather than keep her diagnosis behind closed doors, she said it out loud. She partnered with the Foundation for Women’s Health to launch a research grant funding less invasive treatments. She walked into Capitol Hill alongside congresswomen to help introduce a package of bills aimed at fibroid research, earlier diagnosis, and education for girls before the pain ever begins.

“We must reject the normalisation of female pain. No more suffering in silence.”— Lupita Nyong’o

There is something quietly radical in a woman deciding that her pain is information, not shame. That it is worth examining. That it deserves better than a shrug and a prescription for endurance.

I keep returning to something she said — that it felt empowering to play a part in solving her own problem. Not to be rescued. Not to wait. But to turn toward the very thing she had been taught to ignore, and to ask, gently and then insistently, why has no one looked at this properly?

I think most of us are carrying some version of this. A pain we have learned to live around. A symptom we have explained away. A quiet sense that something is not quite right, set aside because the women before us set theirs aside too. Coming home to your body sometimes begins there; in the willingness to stop translating your own discomfort into normal, and to let it be heard.

You are allowed to ask for more than endurance. You always were.

Have you ever been told that your pain was simply part of being a woman? What did it cost you to believe it; and what might shift if you stopped?

Softly,
Fiona x