Adebimpe Alafe: Five Months Later, What Fibroid Awareness Month Means to Me

Five months ago, I wrote about a tiredness that lived in my bones. I wrote about iron deficiency, about fibroids, about the years I spent being told it was normal, being told it was stress, being told to just push through. I wrote about the fatigue no amount of sleep could touch, and how long it took me to connect that fatigue to something happening quietly inside my own body.

Since then, I have thought a lot about how many of us are still doing that, pushing through, normalising, waiting until things become unbearable before we ask for help. I have thought about the messages I got after that piece ran, from women who told me they saw themselves in it, women who said they had never once considered that their exhaustion might have a name and a cause. Some of them told me they went and asked for a blood count for the first time in years. Some told me they cried reading it, because it was the first time someone had put words to something they had felt but never said aloud.

Last month, July, was Fibroid Awareness Month, and I want to return to that piece not to add a new chapter of symptoms, but to say something I did not say clearly enough the first time: awareness is not just about naming what fibroids are. It is about permitting ourselves to take them seriously long before they become a crisis.

We talk about cramps. We talk about bloating. We have built, culturally, a whole vocabulary for period pain that treats it as something to be managed quietly and privately, something to smile through at work, something to never mention to a doctor unless it becomes truly unbearable. What we do not talk about enough is the exhaustion that has no name, the invisible symptoms, the way fibroids can hollow a person out slowly, long before anyone, including the person living it, realises how serious it has become.

I still think about the numbers every time this month comes around. Black women are two to three times more likely to develop fibroids than white women. We tend to get them earlier and experience more severe symptoms. Some estimates suggest up to 80% of Black women will have fibroids by age 50. These are not small numbers, and yet how many of us actually know them? How many of us have had a real conversation with a doctor about our iron levels, our blood counts, the changes in our own cycles that we have quietly filed away as “normal for me”?

I think part of the problem is that we have been taught to associate strength with silence. To treat discomfort as something to carry alone rather than something to bring into the light. But strength, I am learning, can also look like naming what is happening to you. It can look like asking questions in a doctor’s office instead of nodding along. It can look like sitting with a nurse or a friend and saying, out loud, “this has been going on for longer than I have admitted.” It can look like refusing to let “it is probably just stress” be the end of a conversation that deserves more.

If you are reading this and something in it feels familiar–the fatigue, the heavier cycles, the quiet worry that something is not right–I want to say plainly what I wish someone had said to me sooner: you do not have to wait for it to become unbearable before it counts as real. Fibroid Awareness Month exists so we can stop whispering about this. So this year, I am choosing to be a little louder with the same honesty that made the first piece feel worth writing in the first place.