Some sayings arrive fully formed. The kind that make you laugh and then immediately feel seen in a way that is almost uncomfortable. "My uterus is having a villain arc and nobody warned me" is one of those sayings — and it landed in our submission inbox at a moment when we needed it most.
The Context Behind the Humor
Dark humor has always been a coping mechanism in chronic illness communities. It is not denial — it is a way of holding something terrible and finding the angle from which it becomes almost bearable. The endo community has a particular gift for it, possibly because the gap between how the disease is experienced and how it is treated by the medical system is so absurd that sometimes the only rational response is to laugh.
"Villain arc" is perfect precisely because it captures something true about endometriosis. The disease does not behave. It does not respond predictably to treatment. It shows up when it wants to, affects systems it has no business affecting, and seems almost willfully determined to cause chaos. Calling it a villain arc gives the chaos a narrative frame — and narrative frames help.
"I wrote it at 2am with a heating pad on my stomach and a deadline I was definitely going to miss. It felt more accurate than anything a doctor had ever said to me."
Why Community-Sourced Sayings Matter
Endo Diatribes was built on a specific premise: that the people living with endometriosis are the ones who best understand what it feels like, and that their words — unfiltered, specific, sometimes funny, sometimes devastating — carry a kind of truth that advocacy talking points do not.
When a saying comes from the community and goes onto a product, something happens. The person who submitted it sees their words on a shirt and feels their experience validated in a concrete way. The person who buys the shirt sees those words and recognizes themselves. And the person standing behind that person in the grocery store reads it and learns something about a disease they may have never heard of.
That is awareness that actually moves through the world. It does not stay in a pamphlet or a waiting room poster. It goes places.
How to Submit Your Saying
If you have a saying — funny, raw, specific, devastating, or all of the above — we want it. The process is simple. Submit it through the Drop Your Saying page, tell us the story behind it if you want to, and we will read it. If it makes the cut, you will hear from us directly. Your credit, always. Your story, if you want to share it.
What's your villain arc?
Drop your saying and it might become the next design. We read every single submission.
Drop Your Saying ✍🏾