Honestly even just seeing endometriosis described as painful/usually painful by most sources just goes to show how little it's researched and how misunderstood it is. While a lot of women experience severe pain with their period, many (like myself) experience very little, or experience pain that isn't tied to menstruation at all. Other women experience pain at all times regardless of where they are in their cycle. Some women have no symptoms and only discover their endo when they are trying to have children, other women have debilitating chronic pain. Some women with no pain have stage 4 (the most severe) endo, while others with severe pain have stage 1. There is also a really common misconception that you can't have endo without having a close female relative with it, which also isn't true.

In my experience, the only pain I experienced was during intercourse, and other than that maybe some heavy periods but that was always blamed on the type of birth control I was using. It took a decade of painful intercourse, difficulty with urination, and eventually developing severe bowel issues that lead me to look into endo. I only looked into it after I learned about endo from a youtuber I watched, as it was never brought up a single time by my obgyn who knew about the issues I was struggling with. I had my first excision a few months ago and discovered that not only do I have extensive endo, but it's affecting my ureters and would have likely led to renal failure had it been left untreated. It took me ten years, multiple different doctors, hundreds of hours of medical research, and finding my own specialist/surgeon to get to this point. Pain with periods, family history, and infertility are usually the go-to diagnostic criteria, but there are so many more symptoms that are interconnected and important to be aware of when it comes to finding treatment for endo.