Nobody Believed Me

Introducing a new series on how disbelief follows chronically ill and disabled people across every relationship in their lives, and what to do about it

Photo by Anthony Tran.

Content note: This post contains a first-person account of a medical emergency, descriptions of medical gaslighting and illness invalidation, and discussion of the broader pattern of disbelief that chronically ill and disabled people commonly experience. For those who have lived through similar experiences, some sections may be activating. There is no pressure to read all at once. This will be here whenever you are ready for it.

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My heart rate was over 180 beats per minute when I hit the floor.

I remember the room tilting and the shock of the cold linoleum. I remember the vague blur of people moving around me, my perception of the environment shrinking to an area about six inches in any direction. I remember the ambulance. And I remember the paramedic’s smug smile as he leaned over me and asked, “So, when did your anxiety start?”

As calmly as you can say anything when your heart rate is going that fast, I hissed through clenched teeth: “I do have anxiety, but anxiety is not causing this.”

He didn’t look at me when I said it. He looked across the stretcher to his fellow paramedic, sharing a knowing glance, that smug smile never leaving his face.

At the hospital, I was given fluids and a beta blocker. My heart rate gradually came down. A few hours later, that same paramedic appeared in the doorway of my room. He looked at the monitor and nodded slowly, with the particular satisfaction of a man who has been proven right. Then he tapped the doorframe with his hand, almost like a private salute to himself, and walked away without a word.

My blood boiled.

He never asked what had actually caused my heart rate to spike. He never asked how I was feeling. He had formed his conclusion before he had finished asking his first question, and my monitor had “confirmed” it to his satisfaction.

A few weeks later, I was diagnosed with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), a condition in which the autonomic nervous system fails to regulate heart rate properly upon standing, causing it to spike dramatically. It was the first of many diagnoses to come. It was also a condition that explained, with clinical precision, everything that happened that day.

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The Pattern

Here is what I have come to understand after decades of being chronically ill, multiply disabled, and late-diagnosed autistic: what happened in that ambulance was not a one-off. It was a pattern. And if you are chronically ill, disabled, or neurodivergent (especially if you are a woman), that pattern has almost certainly shown up across every significant relationship of your life.

Medical appointments. Family dynamics. Close friendships. Intimate relationships. For those who are able to work, the workplace too. The same dismissal shows up in different contexts, but always with the same message:

Your experience of your own body, your own mind, and your own life cannot be trusted. Neither can you.

This pattern can be difficult to recognize because it takes different forms across different areas of life, and because patterns are often easier to identify in hindsight than as they gradually unfold. But once you see it, and once you understand not just what is happening but why, everything starts to make a different kind of sense.

For many of us, by the time we arrive at a doctor’s office, we have already been conditioned to expect disbelief. We have learned to downplay our struggles to avoid being labelled dramatic. Somewhere beneath it all, we may have begun to question whether our bodies are misleading us, or whether we are misleading ourselves.

These beliefs often take root long before any medical encounter, emerging from earlier and more intimate experiences. This series is about tracing them all the way back to where they started, and understanding the whole pattern well enough to interrupt it.

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What this series covers

Over the coming months, this series moves through every relationship in which disbelief tends to find us, examining each one in depth, with the psychology behind what’s happening, the systemic forces at work, and real strategies and scripts drawn from four decades of lived experience.

It begins in the doctor’s office and the broader medical system, where most of us first consciously experience this type of disbelief, and asks why a dismissive appointment feels like so much more than just a bad appointment. From there, the series excavates early home life, where the roots of this pattern of disbelief are often buried deepest. It then examines disbelief in our intimate relationships unflinchingly, turns a careful eye to our friendships and the particular grief of watching people quietly fade when they don’t know how to stay, and finally confronts the unique power dynamics of professional disbelief, including the specific difficulty of advocating for yourself when the person you’re speaking to has direct power over your livelihood.

Each installment comes with a companion PDF guide (practical, printable, and designed for real-world use). Something you can bring to a doctor’s appointment, share with someone in your life who wants to understand, or turn to in a waiting room when you need the words and can’t find them.

The first installment publishes April 27. Free subscribers will have access to the opening personal essay, a full examination of the systemic and structural forces driving medical disbelief, and an explanation of why these appointments so often feel like more than just a bad appointment. Paid subscribers receive everything beyond that, including the complete scripts and language strategies, the documentation toolkit, guidance on contesting inaccurate medical records, how to identify when a doctor is not working for you and how to find one who will, and the companion PDF guide, printable and designed to be taken into real medical situations.

This structure carries through every installment in the series. Free subscribers will always receive the opening personal essay and the contextual analysis (the why behind what is happening in each relationship type). Paid subscribers receive the full practical toolkit for each one, including the scripts, the strategies, the boundary-setting language, and a companion PDF guide designed for real-world use.

If you have been looking for something concrete to help you navigate a world that too often fails to believe you, upgrading is a good place to begin.