I realized, recently, that I have been in pain for most of my life. The beginning was subtle. In middle school, I acquired knee pain and hip pain along with braces. Later, I began finding strange bruises on my legs, getting horrible cramps after eating anything of note, and then getting worse cramps after I got my period (obviously). In high school, I developed a vague, formless fatigue of the type my mom had, and found myself constantly buying new supplements for the various “deficiencies”—in iron, Vitamin D, or “female vitality”—that might be causing it. I got an IUD put in and out, which hurt both times. I got tested for Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a vague autoimmune disorder that women often think they have, which came back negative. My mom used to say that “women’s bodies are just more complicated,” which is a nice way of saying that there is nothing particularly wrong with me. Regardless, I have wasted thousands of hours of my life booking doctors appointments, remembering them, Ubering there, going to the pharmacy, picking up pills, avoiding walks, avoiding work, wondering whether I have reached some theoretical limit of self-maintenance, with my acupuncture and YouTube self-massage tutorials and nightly stretching routine (for the hip pain), and realizing that however much time I spend managing pain now, I am still young; it will probably get much worse.
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