Content note: This post mentions depression and suicidal thoughts.
I think I’m finally ready to talk about this…
Five years ago, I published a poetry collection called Life Interrupted under my pen name, D.L. Heather.
At the time, writing under a pen name felt necessary.
Life Interrupted was never only a book about being diagnosed with endometriosis. It was about being a woman in pain and discovering how easily that pain could be dismissed.
It was about the shame and stigma surrounding periods and women’s bodies. Sitting in emergency rooms trying to explain pain that had already been decided was normal. Leaving in agony, no treatment, and so much doubt that I began questioning my own sanity.
It was about learning how to speak up while feeling as though no one really wanted to hear what I had to say.
And what happens to you when you spend years (in my case, nearly two and a half decades) having to prove that your pain is real.
The mental toll of that was part of the story too.
Living in pain every day was hard enough. Not knowing what was happening inside my body, while repeatedly being told there was nothing seriously wrong, made me stop trusting myself.
I became depressed. There were times when the pain felt so relentless that I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life inside it and I began having suicidal thoughts.
I don’t want to leave that out, because endometriosis didn’t only affect my body. It changed what was happening inside my mind too.
Writing those poems meant putting parts of myself on the page that I was still struggling to understand. My body felt like something I was constantly fighting with. I was angry with it. Frightened of it. Exhausted by how much of my life seemed to revolve around pain.
Publishing the book under another name gave me some distance from what I was sharing. It also allowed me to keep that part of my life hidden from people I didn’t feel safe sharing it with.
I could tell the truth without feeling completely exposed.
Endometriosis continued affecting my life long after I finished writing the book. I have since had excision surgery, different procedures and a total hysterectomy, and it still affects my life.
I’ve also been diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases. My experience of chronic illness has become much bigger than the one I wrote about in the original collection.
The pain changed. My relationship with my body changed. So did the way I thought about womanhood and everything we are expected to endure without making other people uncomfortable.
There are things I understand now that I couldn’t have understood when I wrote the original collection.
My writing has changed too.
When I went back through Life Interrupted, there were poems I still loved. They brought me straight back to the woman I was when I wrote them.
But there were also poems that no longer sounded like me.
Some needed more honesty. Others ended before I had reached what I was really trying to say. And there were parts of living with this disease that were missing because I wasn’t ready to write about them.
I realized I didn’t want to simply put the old book inside a new cover.
I wanted to return to it properly.
So I’m bringing Life Interrupted back as a revised edition.
It will include new poems, updated poems, and writing that reflects what endometriosis and chronic pain have meant across more years of my life.
It will also be published under my name, rather than a pen name.
The original edition was named a 2022 Readers’ Favorite Book Award Finalist in Inspirational Poetry, something I’m still incredibly proud of. That recognition will remain part of the book’s history and appear on the new cover.
I’m hoping to have it ready by late November, although I don’t have a firm release date yet.
The original edition of ‘Life Interrupted’ is still available for a little while longer. If you’d like to read the collection as it was first published, before it is replaced by the revised edition, you can find it here.
But for now, I can finally share the new cover with you.
Debra 💕
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