After a season filled with change, Janel Parrish is ready to savor the beauty in her new chapter.
“[I’m] living in the present and just being grateful every day that I wake up and I get to do what I love with people that I love,” Parrish, 37, exclusively shared with Us Weekly while celebrating the End of the Cycle documentary on Wednesday, June 3. “We don’t know what the future brings, and I am just trying to really stay in the present and follow what makes me happy and follow my joy, and that’s been bringing me so much happiness.”
While Parrish has found professional success with roles including Mona Vanderwaal in Pretty Little Liars and Margot Covey in the To All the Boys film series, her personal life has recently had some ups and downs.
Two months ago, Parrish made headlines when she filed for divorce from Chris Long after nearly eight years of marriage. (The exes wed in September 2018 and settled their divorce in May.)
Meanwhile, the actress was also privately coping with an endometriosis diagnosis. According to the Mayo Clinic, the often-painful condition occurs when tissue that is similar to the inner lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. The misplaced tissue can thicken and bleed with each menstrual cycle, leading to pain, inflammation and scarring.
In the new documentary End of the Cycle, Parrish and other leading voices aim to spotlight one of the most underdiagnosed, underfunded and misunderstood diseases in women’s health.
“The hard thing for endometriosis is there isn’t a test to find out,” Parish told Us nearly six months after having surgery for the condition. “I’m feeling really good. I don’t feel any symptoms and I’m doing everything that I can to try to keep living as healthily as I can, and just being positive.”
When she first learned about her diagnosis, Parrish was trying to start a family with her now-ex. Because fertility problems often arise in endometriosis patients, the diagnosis proved to be difficult but physically and emotionally for the actress.
“This thing happens to your body, and then all this pain hits,” she recalled. “I didn’t know what was causing it. I knew that it wasn’t working out. We weren’t getting pregnant, but I didn’t know that I had endometriosis until about two years later when the pain hit.”
Parrish hopes End of the Cycle brings awareness to a disease that affects more than 265 million women worldwide.
She’s also happy to celebrate the official launch of The Endometriosis Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming how endometriosis is researched, treated and understood through funding multidisciplinary research and creating programming that reshapes the cultural conversation around the disease.
“I feel fulfilled. I feel good in my body. I feel happy with where I’m at in my life,” Parrish told Us about her life today. “The endometriosis is gonna be a part of me, and we’re just gonna have to kind of take it as it comes. As of now, as far as I know, I am healthy and happy, and I’ll just take it as it comes.”
End of the Cycle is available to stream for free online.
