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I didn’t suddenly become “sensitive.” Sounds felt sharper. Light felt louder. Touch felt more intrusive. It wasn’t that my senses were malfunctioning — it was that my system had less room to filter.

I didn’t lack words — I lacked a single symptom that told the whole story. What I felt kept shifting, softening, changing places. Every appointment ended the same way: polite confusion, normal tests, and the sense that what I lived didn’t fit the language available.

I wasn’t always this reactive. Before the illness — before the stress — my body handled things quietly in the background. Afterward, it felt like the margin was gone, and the air I lived in suddenly mattered in a way it never had before.

I still wanted to connect. But staying engaged indoors took more out of me than it should have. Socializing wasn’t draining because of people — it was draining because my body was already working too hard.

I wasn’t withdrawing from people. I was withdrawing from environments that made my body tense. The isolation crept in quietly — not from disinterest, but from self-protection that was hard to explain.

I used to think feeling better on vacation meant I was finally relaxing. But the way my body changed — quickly and consistently — told a different story.

I didn’t feel panicked or unsafe in my home. What I felt was constantly alert — like my body never quite powered down, even when life itself was calm.

Being very sick was terrifying — but being almost better unsettled me in a different way. Understanding why that in-between state felt so destabilizing helped me stop mistaking uncertainty for danger.

I thought progress would feel steady. Instead, even small improvements sometimes triggered symptoms. Understanding why change itself was hard for my body helped me stop mistaking progress for danger.

I wasn’t lazy or unmotivated. What changed was how much internal energy it took to initiate things indoors — like the spark to start just wasn’t there.