If you follow Hyland on Instagram, you’ve probably heard about her uterus at some point or another. She often talks about her health on her social media accounts, including her experiences dealing with endometriosis. We talk about a recent Instagram Story she posted that featured two important items in her endometriosis-fighting toolkit: a heating pad and pie. ("But be careful with heating pads," she says, for obvious reasons.)

Then I mention a different Instagram Story, this one saved to her Story Highlights instead of forever lost to the digital ether. In the video, Hyland sits in her car. She’s wearing a pretty white dress. And, she tells viewers, she just got her period. “I don’t care if that was too much information,” she adds.

Hyland is fed up with the stigma surrounding bodily functions like menstruation, which is (obviously) nothing to be ashamed of. She remembers feeling differently when she was younger. "As an adult I just want to call that out and bring kind of a joy to it, in a sense. It's important to talk about and laugh at those situations,” she says. “It's breaking the judgment with humor before you're criticized.”

On a more serious note, she's also tired of people—and doctors in particular—not taking women's pain seriously, especially when it comes to endometriosis. "It affects so many women, and so many women go undiagnosed and just think that they're having horrible cramps and they're being dramatic because that's what they're told," she says. "A lot of doctors think that when you're in pain, you're not really in pain, that you're just being dramatic, that it's all happening in your head. I've been through that. I've dealt with doctors like that. Those doctors can go to hell." So yeah, she's outspoken about this stuff.

She's also no stranger to judgment or criticism. That’s what happens when you’ve been in the public eye since before age 10 and have racked up roughly six million followers on Instagram, give or take. When I mention this figure, she looks a little shocked. “That number doesn't seem like a real number to me because it's strange to think about,” she says. “So, a lot of the times when I post things, like I got my period in my white dress, I forget that it's going out to that many people. I'm just thinking, ‘Oh, my friends will think this is funny!’”

Luckily, most of those six million people are devoted fans. “They're lovely, amazing human beings,” Hyland says. “If someone says a remark that's mean or ignorant or something that shouldn't be asked because it's already been answered in the past, [my fans] go to town. They're my warriors.”

It’s a fitting description, as many of Hyland’s followers, it seems, are fighting their own health issues, often sharing them in her direct messages. (Yes, she reads them sometimes.)

“There's a lot of amazing, brave women and men out there,” she says. “It's mainly women that reach out to me a lot, especially about endometriosis and kidney failure.”

While she hates that other people are in similar situations, she loves the reinforcement of realizing she’s not alone, especially when she’s having the kind of week where it seems as though every person around her is the picture of perfect health.

Responding to each message she receives would take up a lot of time that Hyland doesn’t have. So, to those supporters flooding her DMs and comments, she wants to share a few things that she's found helpful, in the hope that it might be useful to others: