I’m seeing so many women be diagnosed with lupus, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, crohn’s... The gender gap is not about $200 dates. It’s about trauma women experience rooted in a cultural + legally codified mandate of misogyny + misogynoir.

When we collectively make the connection between physical and emotional trauma and autoimmune disease...

...What if autoimmune disease is a reflection having had to silence the self-preservation instincts in order to survive? To silence the fear and repress the anger because expressing it would have caused violence or death... on top of what was already being experiencing?

Where does the fear go? Where does the anger go? Our relationships must create a safe place for those feelings. And when they don’t they burn us up in the inside.

Personally, gut is a tinderbox of inflammation. I’m not the only one.

So, when we talk about pre-existing conditions, we’re not even talking about the diseases any,ore. We are talking about being a woman, being Black, being latinx, being queer.

And given the trauma we have all been experiencing over the past 4 years, especially in 2020? We are gonna see an astronomical rise in autoimmune diseases.