My Endo Story by Maddie Burton
When I was 21, I was diagnosed with PCOS and then when I was 22, I got diagnosed with endometriosis. Essentially, that's how Your Bliss was born. It was not something that I went into being like, ‘I'm going to start a brand’, it was more that I couldn't find anything on the market that was what I wanted to buy, so I decided to make it for myself. It led to a fully-fledged perfume business without the hormone-disrupting chemicals. It’s something that a lot of women who have endo, and those who don't, now have the ability to buy and use every day.
I remember starting my endo journey. It was my surgeon and my doctor at the time that said, ‘you should look at the things that you're putting in and on your body’. It's quite overwhelming if you want to move to a non-tox life and swap everything, because there's so many things that we use every day. Perfume was one of those things where I didn't think there was anything in the market that was really a low-tox version. There were either commercial fragrances or essential oils, and there was nothing in between. Perfume is one of the only beauty products where you don’t have to put your ingredients on the box, which I think is crazy. In your commercial fragrances, parabens, phthalates, synthetic dyes, and preservatives are hormone disrupting chemicals and can exacerbate your endo symptoms. We took them out of our perfumes because they’re just not necessary.
I started the process of finding a manufacturer and the behind-the-scenes stuff in 2019. Finding a manufacturer who would source low-tox ingredients was really difficult. A lot of the samples that I received were really terrible; they smelled gross! It took a really long time to figure out. Then we launched in 2020, around the same two weeks that COVID hit. It was a really interesting time to try to sell perfume to people online that they couldn't smell in person. Perfume is one of those things that, in the past, we would all go into a department store for, but it's becoming such a different experience now where perfume buying online is more accepted. Maybe we've gotten better at explaining what scents smell like.
Since I first got a period, I always had really bad pain. I remember multiple times being in the foetal position. No one could figure out what was wrong with me; that was just normal. It got so bad getting older that I just couldn't keep a job because I was the girl who was in pain all the time, or sick all the time. It took nine to ten years of pain to get diagnosed. With my PCOS, the diagnosis was like a throwaway comment. I didn't feel like it was taken very seriously or explained to me. Then my endo diagnosis was completely random, where I was having a lot of pain in my bowels. I had never heard of it before! I went into surgery just a couple weeks after that initial consultation and they found endo embedded all over my bowels. I was so grateful to have a reason for why I'd been sick all these years. I almost wasn't scared of it because I just was happy that I wasn't crazy.
I've had two laparoscopies and I have a much higher quality of life now than I did. When I first started the business it was really good because the benefit of working for yourself means that you can dictate the hours which you work. On a good day, I'll get up at 5am and I'll exercise. I love pilates and I do strength classes with some of my friends near where I live. Then I'll take my dogs for a walk, and start work around 8-8:30am. As we're still a small business, I wear all of the hats. Some days I'll be doing a photo shoot and taking all of our content for us, or I'll be working with our affiliates or fixing our website. I always make sure that I'm doing some kind of self-care like journaling, meditating, or walking with my mom or my friends, or giving someone a call. To this day, if I have a flare-up, I know that I have the ability to work from bed. I still work, but it's under the conditions that meet my needs.
Endo has been no easy journey but I am grateful for it all the same because it led me to owning and running my own business that I love and enjoy so much.
