Your Pain Has a Credibility Problem

On chronic illness, and the particular exhaustion of having to prove you’re in pain

Being chronically ill is dealing with a specific and particular kind of grief that nobody names. You are not grieving a person. You are grieving the version of yourself that could stay out all night without paying the price for weeks afterwards. The one who was fun and spontaneous. The one who didn’t have to think about it.

It’s laughing along uncomfortably when people say you’re the grandma in the friend group, as if it’s a choice for you.

I have been sick, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember. As a small child I seemed to always have ear infections. As a young teenager things got significantly worse - the development of vertigo, extreme sensitivity in my ears, excessive ear wax production, and the constant, (maddening) build-up of pressure in my head. Think going on a plane and needing to pop your ears. But all the time.

I genuinely stumbled through my five years of high school in a lot of pain and bewilderment, as every specialist told me that “some ear drops should fix that right up.”

Spoiler alert: they did not.

There is something particularly cruel about being a teenage girl in pain and having every doctor look through you. I just knew that I left every appointment feeling smaller than when I walked in, clutching a prescription for something that wouldn’t work, being sent back into my life as if the problem was one of attitude rather than anatomy.

The drama queen.

The hypochondriac.

The girl who just needed to manage her stress better.

Being chronically ill is learning, early, that your pain has a credibility problem.

My first panic attack happened at school. I hid them because I wanted to feel more in control of my body. A panic attack is the definition of being out of control, and there were already so many things about my body I couldn’t control. It wasn’t until I was covered in stress-induced eczema and started losing my hair that I had no choice but to confront it. My mum found a yoga therapist. We’d spend half the session talking, half in guided meditation and yoga. I left every session feeling happy and relieved and weirdly rested.

When I left home and moved from New Zealand to Ireland, my ear problems had become a new set of rules I just lived inside: I couldn’t go swimming. I couldn’t ride a bike. I needed to make sure I never ran out of anti-nausea medication. I needed to stock up on painkillers before going on a plane.

Being chronically ill is the list of things you just don’t do anymore, so normalised you forget they’re losses.

In Dublin I could barely afford my essential visits to the microsuction clinic every two months, let alone specialist appointments. Chronic illness is expensive in a way that compounds quietly. It isn’t one big cost. It is the relentless accumulation of small ones - the prescriptions, the consultations, the treatments that don’t work, the travel to appointments, the days of work you miss. It is keeping money in a savings account you are not allowed to touch in case you need it for health costs, watching your peers spend their equivalent on deposits and holidays and futures, understanding that your future has a different shape.

It wasn’t until I moved to London and was able to use private health insurance through work that I found some sort of resolution. Within the first twenty minutes of my appointment with a new doctor, not only did I feel validated and taken seriously, I also had three diagnoses. BPPV, a Eustachian disorder, and chronic ear infections. Three diagnoses in twenty minutes, after over a decade of being told it was probably nothing.

He performed the Epley Manoeuvre on me, and after that, all of my vertigo symptoms were gone. Completely. Gone. After eight years.

Let’s sit with that for just a moment. Eight years of vertigo, of unreliable balance, of knocking myself out on the bathroom sink. Eight years of being told some ear drops should sort it. And it took one doctor (one doctor who listened) half an hour to fix it.

This is what it means to be a woman in a healthcare system that is not designed with you in mind. The research on this is not subtle. Women wait longer in emergency rooms. Women’s pain is more frequently dismissed, minimised, attributed to anxiety. We have been conditioned so thoroughly to doubt ourselves, to be grateful for whatever scraps of attention we receive, that we leave appointments saying thank you to doctors who have just hurt us.

In 2024 I tried a new ear specialist. Sadly, the nerves I felt before the appointment were once again justified.

He dismissed my concerns before he’d finished reading them. He had me perched on the edge of the patient’s bed, feet dangling, not wearing gloves, tools not laid out on a sterile surface. It felt as though a toddler was waving a knife around in my ear canal. I have had my ears cleaned out countless times (at least four times a year since I was twelve) so I know what it is meant to feel like. It was not meant to feel like that.

It was when he put the metal tool against my eardrum that I felt extreme pain and started to hear ringing, and I asked him to stop.

Tears slowly running down my face, he looked at me and rolled his eyes. “What is it?”

“I’ve just never had it hurt that much,” I replied, trying not to sound like I was crying, even though I was visibly crying.

He waved his hand. “Oh there’s only a little bit left, come on it’s nearly over.”

I dug my fingers into my hand, not realising I was breaking skin, to try and distract myself from the pain.

I sat there dumbfounded afterwards. I felt violated. He prescribed me a nasal spray I had already tried twice, and I nodded away, putting on the bravest face I could muster. “Thank you,” I said as I walked out.

Why the fuck did I thank that man?

As soon as I was on the street I started crying properly, that kind of crying where your chest is heaving, you’re straining to get enough air in your lungs, and there’s a drip from your chin that is a mixture of snot and tears. I called my best friend Maeve and could barely get the words out. “That was horrible, it was so painful, it’s not meant to be like that.”

A week later, still finding blood in my ear canal, I saw my GP. After looking in my ear he confirmed what I had suspected: the specialist had perforated my eardrum, and scraped off a lot of skin in my ear canal, leaving it a scabbing mess of dried blood and pus. He prescribed me painkillers and antibiotics, and topped up my prescription of Sertraline - an antidepressant I’d started taking earlier that year to help manage the anxiety I was having surrounding my health. The everyday dread when I woke up.

Medication is another whole aspect of being chronically ill. Buying a pill box at the age of 25 because you are taking too many different drugs to stay on top of them. Keeping notes on how you react to each one, because although they may help one aspect of your wellbeing, the side effects may cost you somewhere else. I learned that more brutally than ever when I developed a cyst in my ear canal in early 2025. The steroids they prescribed cleared it, but plunged me into a depression so specific and sudden it scared me. My corresponding note: if I ever have to take that drug again, I need my best people around me.

Being chronically ill is not knowing if you’re too sick to love, to have a reliable partner. Because if I can hardly cope with this, how could someone else do it by choice? It’s worrying you’re too sick to have children. It’s turning up to the family function and dodging not just the questions about whether you’ve got a partner yet, but also:

“Did you get your ears sorted?”

“Can’t you just get a surgery to fix that?”

“So what is it that’s actually wrong with your ears?”

Or even just the simple “how are you” - and replying with “yeah good thanks, and you?” while a searing pain shoots through your ear.

Things that don’t go away inevitably fluctuate. It’s trying to keep the wave of pain more of a gentle squiggle rather than peaks and pits. Just trying to make it tolerable.

Every now and then I have an absolute meltdown. I cry and I feel so sorry for myself. I take all my supplements, I drink my herbal teas, I take my medicine, I eat unprocessed whole foods, I get fresh air and exercise most days. What more do you want me to do? What more can I do?

The tremor in my hand that started after my concussion in 2022 still appears when my pain is bad - a dead giveaway to my friends and family that I’m actually putting on a brave face. They know to look for it. I didn’t ask them to learn that. They just did.

That’s the other cost nobody mentions. The cost to the people who love you, who learn the signals, who quietly adjust their plans, who meet you at the door when you call from the street crying. The way chronic illness spreads outward. The way it asks things of people who never signed up for it either.

I know this doesn’t get better in a straight line. My hearing aids will need to be continually reprogrammed as my hearing worsens. My pain may get worse before it gets anything resembling easier. I have made a kind of peace with that - not a cheerful peace, not a tidy one, but a real one. And I have learned that the peace isn’t permanent either. Some days the grief returns, fresh and specific. A friend mentions a spontaneous night out, or I watch someone swim in the sea, and I feel it all over again. The mourning for the version of myself I never fully got to be. I’ve stopped expecting that to stop. It’s part of the deal.

What I have, though, is knowledge I earned the hard way. I know how to read a room, a prescription, and a doctor’s body language. I know exactly what my body needs and when it needs it. I know how to fight for myself in systems that were not built for me. I know, now, that fighting is not the same as being difficult.

I’m not fixed. I was never going to be fixed. But I have good doctors now, a pharmacist who knows my name, a pill box I actually use, and people who know what the bad days look like. The person I’ve become, she wasn’t who I planned to be. But she’s who I am. She knows her own body intimately. She knows who she can call from the street, crying, and who will meet her at the door.

She misses the girl she was, but she’s not waiting for her anymore.