The Body Remembers What I Forgot
Diagnosis as amplifier, distortion, and recontextualizion.
Content warnings: This essay discusses medical experiences including health anxiety, chronic illness (hEDS, POTS, FND), detailed physical symptoms, medical trauma, parental death, autistic burnout, and healthcare access barriers.
Prologue: My Throat
Many essays about illness still pretend that categories matter more than bodies. I disagree. What follows is not just a personal account, but a proposition - a third model for complex, overlapping diagnoses, where nothing arrives unmediated. This is not a memoir about FND, hEDS, and POTS as parallel tracks. My daily life is a feedback loop: symptoms, stories, and survival logic, each rewriting the others in real time.
The day before my first trauma therapy session as a client, I was certain my trachea was caving in on itself - an alien familiarity, a body folding past the point of reason. I stood in the bedroom, hands pressed to my throat, breath slotting through a narrowing channel. My beloved partner Wyatt looked at me with his “trying very hard not to be afraid” face.
“Does it look wrong?” I asked. “Check. Please, does my throat look collapsed?”
He examined me, puzzlement and concern and gentleness across his face.
“If your trachea were really collapsing, you couldn’t talk. I love you. I’m here,” he said, summoning certainty for both of us.
“Are you sure?” It felt so bad that I doubted basic anatomy.
He hugged me. “If not, we’ll go to the ER together.”
It wasn’t answers that helped. It was presence.
I. The Quiet Collapse
Doing better can sometimes be the prelude to coming undone. I’d recently left community mental health as a clinician, and I was working through autistic burnout. My father had died the year before, but I was upright and processing my loss and exhaustion. Then my body began to fail, quietly, almost politely. Swallowing suddenly felt risky, and my neck doubted it could hold my head up.
Pain is old news - I’ve lived with hEDS (Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) and POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) for years, joints slipping, heart rate shooting up. But this pain was a new song - a new tune I couldn’t immediately file under “trauma” or “anxiety.”
II. Naming the Pattern
My insurance from my previous job ran out. Avoiding care was never about courage - I hesitated because it can be difficult to know which alarms are urgent, and which are ghosts. Sometimes my body cries out for concrete intervention: dislocated joint, autonomic crash. Sometimes the terror is a shape in the dark, a nerve haunted by memory.
When I had insurance, I went to urgent care, and they found nothing - perfect labs. In the middle of the night, clarity landed.
“Wyatt, I think I have conversion disorder.” An old, problematic name, remembered from my time at the local mental health authority.
My therapist, the next day: “That’s huge. And terrifying. You named it.”
III. The Misfit Profile
Functional Neurological Disorder is the modern name, but the legacy is older - a history of real pain dismissed under the name conversion disorder, especially in those marginalized by the clinical gaze. The frame of functional neurological disorder is a useful tool: a living, if uneven, language that gives shape to the complex experience of your brain creating clinically recognizable physical symptoms.
Here’s what medicine and memoir miss: I do not experience FND, hEDS, and POTS as separate roads. FND changes how the other conditions move through me. A dysautonomia flare is not POTS “alone” nor does a joint slip happen without FND coloring the pain. The boundaries cross. Each diagnosis transforms the others - a recursive choreography.
My daily survival is this: no isolated wisdom. My symptoms are collaborative, sometimes colliding, always in motion. What is called “medical” and “functional” or “neurological” and “behavioral” - these categories dissolve in contact with a living body.
IV. When the Body Tells the Truth
A diagnosis is not a fix, but it gives context. For a while, “FND” loosened fear’s grip. It gave me language for the gap between sensation and danger. Knowledge toggles: at times, I rush for salt, a joint relocation, a doctor’s hands; other times, I stand back, curious, letting it teach me how my body protects and reveals.
FND didn’t eliminate my “physical” needs. Every episode is collaborative. What’s left is the feedback loop.
V. A New Kind of Listening
None of this disappears - chronic conditions and diagnoses with histories that make me wince. The difference now is trust.
When my body sings a new warning, I say to Wyatt, “I’m not dying, but it feels weird. Can you check me?”
Sometimes I go to the doctor.
Sometimes I let time test the alarm.
Always, I listen.
The old demands to divide “real” and “not real” pain sound like superstition. Both matter. Tending to living architecture means greeting every symptom with humility.
I’m not asking for certainty. Not disappearing is enough.
VI. Coda
Let’s say it plainly: This is a proposal for a more accurate frame for disability that recognizes disabilities do not exist in individual containers, but in a dynamic system.
What you have just read is a map for a potential third way - in my own life, where FND acts as a mediator that recalibrates what I experience. POTS, hEDS, FND - none of these can be divorced from each other. In practice, my body is a feedback loop, not a taxonomy. Every new diagnosis amplifies, distorts, and recontextualizes the others.
This is an invitation for fellow providers to continue to rethink how we map, live, and care for complex experiences. The most honest thing we can do is build our models in full view.