Tiffany Haddish opens up about endometriosis, eight miscarriages, and medical neglect—revealing how knowledge, humor, and healing reshaped her survival.
By the time the laughter fades, the truth remains.
Backstage smells like hairspray, hot lights, and nerves. Tiffany Haddish presses her palm into her lower abdomen, breathing through a pain she knows too well. Out front, the crowd is roaring. They expect She Ready energy—big laugh, big presence, big joy. What they don’t see is the moment she pauses, eyes closed, steadying herself.
“I didn’t want people to smell my weakness,” she has said. “I was scared if they knew, they’d treat me like I was broken.”
For years, Haddish did what she’s always done: she pushed through. Pain became background noise. Grief became fuel. Survival meant silence.
Haddish’s rise is one of the most electric in modern comedy—a woman who clawed her way out of foster care, homelessness, and instability with nothing but timing, nerve, and an unbreakable sense of humor. Hustle culture wasn’t a trend for her; it was a necessity.
“You don’t stop,” she writes in I Curse You With Joy. “Stopping meant losing everything.”
So she worked through chronic pelvic pain. She worked through exhaustion. She worked through the quiet devastation of miscarriage after miscarriage—eight in total—losses she carried privately while selling joy publicly. The industry rewarded the smile, not the truth.
“I thought if I just kept going, my body would fall in line,” she admits. It didn’t.
More Endometriosis & Mental Health Stories
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- Halsey: Halsey speaks candidly about endometriosis, miscarriage, and the mental health battle fans never saw coming
- Whoopi Goldberg: Whoopi Goldberg reflects on living with endometriosis and how unmanaged pain can quietly impact mental well-being
Endometriosis is a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside it, causing inflammation, severe pain, heavy periods, fatigue, and infertility. According to the Endometriosis Foundation of America, it affects about one in ten women—but diagnosis can take seven to ten years.
For Black women, that delay is often longer.
This is the part of Haddish’s story that moves beyond celebrity confession and into systemic failure. Black women are statistically less likely to have their pain taken seriously by medical providers and more likely to have reproductive symptoms dismissed as “stress” or “normal.”
Haddish was told variations of the same thing: You’re fine. It’s just cramps. You’re working too much.
“I knew something was wrong,” she writes. “But nobody was listening.”
For a long time, Haddish wore her endurance like armor. Pain became proof she was strong. Silence became strategy.
“I was raised to survive,” she says. “Survivors don’t complain. They adapt.”
That mindset served her on stage—but nearly broke her off it. Endometriosis doesn’t respond to willpower. Miscarriage doesn’t heal on a schedule. Grief doesn’t care about call times.
Behind the scenes, her body was fighting a battle she didn’t yet have language for.
The shift came not with collapse, but with clarity.
After years of unexplained pain and loss, Haddish finally received a diagnosis that made sense of her experience. Endometriosis. A word that connected the dots between her symptoms and her miscarriages, between her exhaustion and her resilience.
Dr. Tamer Seckin, a leading endometriosis specialist, explains it simply: “Endometriosis is not just a bad period. It’s a whole-body inflammatory disease. When it goes untreated, it can affect fertility, mental health, and quality of life.”
For Haddish, the diagnosis was an “aha” moment—equal parts relief and rage.
“I wasn’t weak,” she realized. “I was sick. And there’s a difference.”
The miscarriages remain the quiet center of her story. Eight times, hope arrived and disappeared. Eight times, she had to get back on stage and make strangers laugh.
“There’s no handbook for that,” she writes. “People don’t know what to say, so they say nothing. Or worse, they tell you to stay positive.”
Haddish doesn’t sanitize the grief. She lets it coexist with humor, with anger, with moments of dark levity that feel unmistakably hers. She jokes about survival the way only someone who’s truly lived it can—raw, specific, unfiltered.
“That’s how I process,” she says. “If I can laugh, I can breathe.”
What changed wasn’t just the diagnosis—it was how Haddish began to treat herself.
She stopped seeing rest as weakness. She started asking better questions in doctor’s offices. She learned the language of her own body and demanded it be respected.
Experts emphasize that this kind of self-advocacy is critical. “Patients who understand their condition are better equipped to seek appropriate care,” Dr. Seckin notes. “Especially in diseases that are historically underdiagnosed.”
For Haddish, knowledge became power—and permission.
Today, her care routine looks different. It’s holistic, intentional, and unapologetic. She prioritizes sleep. She pays attention to inflammation. She incorporates therapy, nutrition, movement, and spiritual practices that ground her.
“I listen now,” she says. “If my body whispers, I don’t wait for it to scream.”
There’s still humor. There’s still hustle. But it’s no longer fueled by self-erasure.
In I Curse You With Joy, Haddish reframes joy not as constant happiness, but as truth-telling. As survival with honesty. As choosing to be seen, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Her story doesn’t end with a miracle cure or a tidy resolution. It ends with agency.
“I’m still a survivor,” she says. “But now I survive out loud.”
And in that declaration—funny, fierce, and finally free—there’s space for anyone who’s ever been told their pain was invisible to feel seen.
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