I get the impression that I come off as a whiner/complainer/exaggerator when it comes to physical complaints. I suspect a large part of this is that I feel things much more strongly than most people do, so for me, yes it really is that bad. There's a big difference in the way my mom treats my brother when he has a malady versus the way she treats me when I have the same thing or worse. My brother has a headache - "Oh, you poor dear, let me take care of you!" I have a migraine (I pretty much always have a headache of some level, I don't even bother mentioning when I have one) - "Well, just take some ibuprofen and have some caffeine." (And my mom gets migraines too, so she knows what they're like) My brother has a cold - she doesn't expect him to go in to work that day. I have a cold with pretty bad dizziness - I'm still expected to walk the dog and attend horseback riding lessons. That's a large part of what gives me that impression, is this disparity. I know my body has a tendency to cry wolf (mimicking the symptoms of MS (before I had a clue what it actually was, so I don't see how it could have been psychosomatic), randomly swollen lymph nodes on the side of my neck that had us (including my doctor) concerned about the possibility of lymphoma, only to have nothing actually be wrong either time), but I don't just make stuff up, and I don't exaggerate how bad I feel or anything - but I get the impression that at least my mom thinks I do. But I also get doctors acting like they think I'm exaggerating or making things up.
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Yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
-H. P. Lovecraft, "The Outsider"