I ignored it because I didn’t want to be dramatic

Dear Delyara, I’ve ignored too many physical symptoms in my life because I didn’t want to be “one of those people.” The people who complain too much. The people who always have something wrong. The people who need attention. The people who make normal tiredness into a medical identity. So instead I did what I’ve always done. I minimized. I delayed. I translated discomfort into stress and stress into tiredness and tiredness into “I’ll deal with it later.” I’m starting to realize how much damage that mindset can do. There is something deeply sad about learning to distrust your own body’s signals because you’ve been taught that endurance is more respectable than care. I don’t want to wait for my body to become impossible to ignore before I treat it like it matters.