What’s Wrong With Me?

For most of my life, my first instinct was accusation.

Why can’t I focus like everyone else?
Why am I so tired when I haven’t “earned” it?
Why do small things feel so heavy?

“What’s wrong with me?” became a reflex, as automatic as breathing. I asked it in bathrooms, in parked cars, in the quiet moments before sleep when the day replayed itself with all its missed cues and unfinished tasks.

I treated my body like a malfunctioning machine. If it slowed down, it was defective. If it panicked, it was broken. If it shut down, it was lazy.

No one explicitly taught me this thinking. It was absorbed—through productivity culture, through praise that came only when I pushed past my limits, through the subtle message that discomfort was a personal failure rather than a human signal.

The first time my body truly forced the issue, it wasn’t dramatic. No hospital room. No collapse in public. Just a morning where I couldn’t get out of bed, not because I was sick, but because something inside me had quietly pulled the emergency brake.

I lay there staring at the ceiling, furious at myself. I mentally listed all the reasons I had no right to feel this way. Other people had it worse. I was lucky. I was capable. I was wasting time.

That familiar question rose again: What’s wrong with me?

But something about that morning was different. The exhaustion didn’t feel like weakness. It felt… deliberate. Protective. As if my body had made a decision I kept refusing to make myself.

Rest.

That was the first crack in the story I’d been telling myself.

Over the following weeks, I started noticing patterns I had ignored for years. Anxiety didn’t appear out of nowhere—it followed long stretches of saying yes when I meant no. Brain fog showed up after days of pretending I was fine. Irritability spiked when I hadn’t had a moment alone.

These weren’t random glitches. They were responses.

I began experimenting with a different question. It felt awkward at first, like speaking a foreign language.

Instead of “What’s wrong with me?”
I asked, “What is this trying to tell me?”

When I couldn’t focus, I stopped forcing productivity and asked what I was avoiding. Often, it was fear—not laziness—that had tangled my thoughts. When my body felt heavy, I asked what I’d been carrying emotionally. When my chest tightened, I asked where I felt unsafe.

The answers weren’t always convenient. Sometimes they meant changing plans. Sometimes they meant disappointing people. Sometimes they meant sitting with feelings I’d trained myself to outrun.

But something surprising happened: the symptoms softened when they were heard.

Not instantly. Not magically. But steadily.

I realized how much energy I’d spent fighting myself—shaming sensations instead of listening to them. It was like arguing with a smoke alarm instead of checking for fire.

Pain, fatigue, anxiety, numbness—these weren’t enemies. They were messengers that had been knocking politely for years before resorting to shouting.

This reframing didn’t make life easy. It made it honest.

I stopped pushing through exhaustion just to prove I could. I stopped labeling rest as weakness. I stopped measuring my worth by how much discomfort I could tolerate without complaint.

Most importantly, I stopped treating my inner world like something that needed fixing.
I started treating it like something that needed understanding.
There are still days when the old question sneaks back in. Old habits don’t disappear quietly. But now I catch myself. I pause. I breathe. I translate.
Because the truth I’ve learned is this: symptoms are not character flaws. They are communication.
And when you finally listen, your body doesn’t have to scream.