What My Women’s Health Journey Taught Me About Self-Advocacy

Growing up, I never had strong feelings about the seasons, especially Spring. Summer was easy to love: holidays, swimming pools, BBQs. Winter had Christmas, my absolute favorite time of the year. Fun fact about me: I have a collection of Christmas sweaters and wear a different one every day from December 1st until Christmas Eve.

But Autumn and Spring? They didn’t mean much to me. That changed when I moved to the Netherlands.

Living here made me notice the seasons in a completely different way. I started to see their impact on my wellbeing, particularly on my mental health. Around the same time, I trained to become a yoga teacher and began learning about Ayurvedic traditions and how our bodies and energy connect to seasonal cycles.

Spring started to represent something new to me: the return of sunlight, creativity, and energy and sometimes even the return of the will to live. If you experience seasonal depression, you know exactly what I mean.

But March carries another significance too. March is both Endometriosis Awareness Month and the month of International Women’s Day.

And this year, sitting in my garden working because the weather is finally just right, it feels like the right moment to share a more personal reflection on women’s health.

Three words that changed how I see healthcare: “You’re probably fine.” Many women have heard some version of this from a doctor.

But when you start looking at the data, you realize something unsettling: women’s health concerns are more likely to be dismissed, misdiagnosed, or diagnosed years later than they should be. And sometimes, diagnostic delays shape entire life journeys. Once you experience this personally, the conversation becomes impossible to ignore.

When International Women’s Day Became Personal

For many years, I didn’t fully grasp the meaning of International Women’s Day. That changed when I started working in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It changed when I read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez and began understanding how much of the world is designed around male data from healthcare to workplace policies.

Here are some statistics:

• Women wait on average 4 years longer than men for many medical diagnoses.

• 1 in 10 women globally lives with endometriosis, yet it takes 7–10 years on average to be diagnosed.

• Women are twice as likely as men to experience depression and anxiety disorders.

• Despite this, women’s health research receives a fraction of global healthcare funding.

  
  

And then, my own lived experiences started intersecting with those realities.

Freezing My Eggs: Advocating for My Future

My journey started with the decision to freeze my eggs. Because of my mental health challenges, I spent years questioning whether I should become a mother. Deep down, I knew I wanted to but I worried about what that might mean for a child.

Therapy helped me see something important: the fact that I was thinking so carefully about it was already an act of care.

By the time I reached that point in my healing journey, I was single, in my early thirties, and navigating a demanding phase of my career. Egg freezing felt like giving myself time and space.

But doing it alone, as an expat navigating a foreign healthcare system, wasn’t easy. At the time, elective egg freezing wasn’t very common in the Netherlands. I had to advocate strongly for myself just to receive a referral to a fertility clinic.

Thankfully, once I got there, I met an incredible doctor who empowered me and supported my concerns, especially around the potential mental health impact of hormone treatments.

We talked about everything I was already doing to support myself: therapy, journaling, meditation, yoga, nutrition. He worked with me every step of the way.

The process itself was intense. But it also left me deeply in awe of my body and my mindful way of approaching life. The day before the egg retrieval, I created a small ritual connecting with my body, my womb, and my eggs, blessing whatever future might come from them.

Still, it took two years for my body to fully recover. And even though I would not change the decision I made, I would change the amount of support I could have gotten, particularly  if there was not a taboo around the topic. 

The Long Road of Mental Health

My mental health journey has been another chapter of advocacy. For years, I was misdiagnosed. The condition I live with is complex and often difficult to identify.

What we do know is that around 75% of diagnosed cases are women, and 7–8 out of 10 people with this condition attempt suicide at least once in their lifetime.

Hormones, treatment approaches, and gender bias in diagnosis all play a role.

Like many women navigating the healthcare system, I had to become my own researcher, advocate, and experimenter, learning what helped and building daily practices that support my wellbeing. I convinced myself I would do everything in my power to learn how to navigate life, in the best way possible, with this diagnosis.

Finally, an Endometriosis Diagnosis

In recent years, I began noticing changes in my menstrual cycle. Painful periods had been a constant in my life, but the symptoms were evolving. That led to conversations with my doctor and eventually to a diagnosis: endometriosis.

In January this year, I had surgery. This was the first ever in my life, again in navigating a foreign health system. Naturally, I’m still recovering from this experience. 

And looking back, it’s astonishing how many years of intense pain, and a monthly cycle of questioning my existence, were normalized before the condition was properly identified.

Unfortunately, that experience is not unique and period conversations belong in the workplace, studies show that 1 in 5 women experience severe menstrual symptoms that affect their ability to work.

Why Workplace Conversations Matter

In every one of these experiences, I had to advocate for myself, my body, my mind, and my health.

You might think:  “She seems confident. Of course she can speak up.”

But the truth is that my work empowered me to do so.

I worked in close partnership with the company’s Women’s Employee Resource Group and we started opening up space for topics that had long been invisible in the workplace:

• Fertility journeys and egg freezing

• Different paths to parenthood, including surrogacy

• Mental health and intersectionality

• Menstruation and menopause

• Pregnancy and returning to work

  
  

Together we built:

• Educational webinars

• Toolkits for employees and managers

• Programs designed to better support women across different life stages

  
  

Working in DEI and workplace wellbeing exposed me to research, statistics, and resources that helped me understand not only global inequalities, but also what was happening inside my own body. It gave me the language and confidence to have better conversations with healthcare professionals. It also gave me the courage to have honest conversations at work.

Because those webinars helped inform my own health decisions.  Those toolkits helped me have conversations with my own manager. And the programs created space for others to feel seen and supported.

Talking about women’s health at work is not a “nice to have.”

It can quite literally change lives.

Spring and the Reality of Progress

So what does all of this have to do with Spring? Spring is a season of renewal, but also of fluctuation.

Some days feel full of energy and possibility. Others feel stuck, slow, and uncertain.

I see women’s health advocacy the same way.

Sometimes we see momentum and progress. Other times we’re reminded how much work still needs to be done.

Both things can be true at the same time.

What matters most is that we don’t stop having the conversation.

Because conversations create awareness. Awareness sparks inspiration. Inspiration leads to action.

And action is how change begins.

Women’s health conversations often start in private,  in doctors’ offices, therapy rooms, or quiet conversations with friends.

But they shouldn’t stay there.

Because when workplaces acknowledge these realities,  fertility journeys, chronic conditions, mental health, menopause, menstruation,  they create environments where people don’t have to choose between their wellbeing and their careers.

Sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do is simply make space for women to tell their stories  and be believed when they do.

This International Women’s Day, I’m grateful for the research, the advocates, the workplaces, and the communities helping move these conversations forward.

And I’m especially grateful for every woman who chooses to share her story because those stories are often the catalyst for change.