When I was a baby, my pediatrician told my parents that I would always experience things "very deeply."
I was there for a stomach thing. Minor, as these things go. But that was the assessment, and it followed me around for the next few decades: not a diagnosis, a personality. Something for therapy, probably. Certainly nothing you'd treat.
He wasn't wrong, exactly. He just had the wrong mechanism.
I have been sick my whole life, and for most of it, nobody could tell me why.
There were rashes nobody could explain. I stayed sick longer than the other kids. I felt things physically, in my body more than my friends seemed to, and I could never tell whether that meant something was wrong with me or whether everyone was just quietly tougher about it than I was.
As an adult it settled into something more constant. Achy. Physically uncomfortable, more or less all the time. Tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix. Foggy. In pain. Seizures. I could continue, but you get it.
And no name for any of it.
That's the part I want to talk about, because I don't think it gets talked about enough. When you're in pain, and there's no explanation, you don't just have pain. You have pain plus the growing suspicion that you're making it up. Every test that comes back clean is evidence against you. You start editing how you describe it, because you can hear how it sounds. You wonder if you're the problem.
Feeling crazy and being in pain is a bad combination. It’s one I had for years.
Here is the part that felt almost petty at the time, and doesn't anymore: I love clothes. I have built an entire career around them. Fashion is the language I'm most fluent in, and my body had made me a stranger in it.
During a flare, I can't do buttons if they're small. I can't get things easily over my head or clasp some of my favorite necklaces. So the thing I loved most, the thing I was actually good at, became one more daily negotiation I was losing. That was the insult on top of it.
And you can't shop for that. You can't walk into a store and say, excuse me, can you show me the options with bigger buttons. How about pants that I can put on when my knee feels like it’s on fire?
What changed wasn't a breakthrough. It was exhaustion.
After enough years and enough diagnoses- and there were several, each one arriving with great confidence and then quietly not being it- I realized that I had stopped caring what the answer was. I only wanted relief. If it came from a pill, great. Acupuncture, awesome. Meditation, fabulous. I no longer had a preference about the form. I just wanted to feel better.
For me, it turned out to be a cocktail of medications and a genuinely serious focus on my stress levels. Not glamorous. Effective.
They did eventually put a name on it. I'm not going to tell you what it is, and that's deliberate — partly because it isn't the point, and partly because I'd like anyone reading this who is still waiting for their name to know that the name is not the thing.
Because when I finally got it (the name, that is), I did not feel better. The diagnosis had no bearing whatsoever on how I felt. It explained something. It didn't fix anything. All the relief I've gotten came before it and separately from it.
What I actually had to learn was how to live with the feelings. Not how to label them.
So here's what that looks like on a regular Wednesday.
Elastic-waist pull-on pants. A button-down, with buttons that aren't too tiny. A spandex-y top that means I don't have to wear a bra. Everything I own has to be gettable-into on a bad morning, because I don't always know at 7 am which kind of morning it is.
And then jewelry. Always the jewelry. Fabulous, non-negotiable jewelry.
If you asked me for my personal style in three words: jewelry-first, proportionally playful. That's not a compromise, and I want to be clear about that, because I think there's an assumption that dressing around a body means giving something up. It doesn't. It means the decisions get made in a different order. I start with the jewelry and build out. The pants must be easy, so the rest can be interesting.
My pediatrician was right about one thing. I do experience things very deeply. It just wasn't a character trait — it was information, and it took about thirty years and several wrong names for anyone to read it that way.
I don't need it to be called anything anymore. I just need to be able to get dressed.
