There’s a strange clarity that comes when you’re alone—when you step outside the noise of systems, expectations, and shared rhythms. Clarity isn’t always pleasant. It doesn’t arrive wrapped in certainty or relief. Sometimes it feels more like a stark horizon, the edge of something, where your body begins to speak in ways it hadn’t before. This past week, I’ve felt that shift. My symptoms—subtle most days—have grown louder. My fatigue deeper. Something that was buffered has worn off, and now I’m listening without the filter.
I’ve had a quiet theory for a while: that having health insurance keeps you healthier, not just by access to care, but by what it represents. It’s a contract with a collective, a form of psychological scaffolding. Our minds and bodies are stronger by tapping into this corporate collective of healthcare. When I had coverage, I noticed my body held itself differently—like it trusted the support system, even subconsciously. That trust seemed to stabilize my symptoms. My thyroid was less chaotic then, though I won’t go into specifics. What mattered was the tone of the system I was in: it made space for me, or at least, pretended to. And the body, ever watchful, responded to that.
Medicaid is different. Not worse, exactly—but different in tone. It’s a system designed around minimums: the least care to keep you functional. It operates from a place of austerity, not generosity. That changes something, invisibly. The collective you belong to no longer expects wellness—it expects survival. And when that’s the standard, your body hears it too. The symptoms I once ignored are harder to mute now, maybe because the system no longer pretends to care in the same way. Maybe I’ve stopped pretending too, now that my insurance is gone.
Because that’s the deeper layer—I wasn’t just stabilized by the system; I was silencing myself to belong to it. I internalized its values, filtered my symptoms through its expectations. When the collective doesn’t want to hear weakness, we learn not to speak it. We keep showing up, functioning, carrying on—until something slips, and we finally realize how quiet we've been with ourselves.
But this muting of weakness by systems isn’t new. RFK Jr. recently made a comment about how he’d never seen full-blown autism in 70-year-olds, implying that it’s a new phenomenon. But the truth is, we used to lock away anyone who didn’t fit the frame of “functional.” They were institutionalized, hidden, erased. My cousin was almost one of them. Doctors told her parents she would never walk, that she should be institutionalized. But with intense physical therapy and family support, she walked. She grew. She reads with passion. She lives. Her life could have been lost to the collective silence that surrounded weakness back then.
Back then, the muting was physical: out of sight, out of mind. Now it’s psychological. We mute weakness not by locking it away, but by flooding ourselves with distractions, performances, and projections. We don’t sit with our own fragility—we outsource it. We amplify it in others, shame it in culture, dissect it online. Social media has become our new sanitarium—one where we point fingers instead of tending to wounds. The collective still does not want to hear weakness. It just has better tools for pretending.
And so we carry it inside. We keep it quiet so we can keep functioning. But when the collective fades into the background—when the performance stops—our bodies remember. They speak.
My mother had her thyroid removed (must have been in the 70’s) but I don’t think she ever fully understood what that meant. For years afterward, she drifted through life with growing fatigue. I remember her nearly falling asleep at the wheel, and when I asked if she’d been taking her medication, she’d often admit she’d forgotten for days. She vaguely knew it was important to take, but life is too busy for her to really take care of herself when she was taking care of everyone else. Her symptoms—exhaustion, forgetfulness, brain fog—were things she carried as private shame, never once suspecting they were signals. She mistook them for personal failings, not medical ones.
When I was in high school her hair started thinning which upset her greatly, she considered buying a wig instead of asking a doctor why. Then in my psychology class, I read a list of hypothyroid symptoms. The page might as well have been a mirror. I showed it to her, and it was the first time she considered that the hair loss and fatigue weren’t just “her.” She went to the doctor, got her dose adjusted, and her hair began to grow back. She started taking better care of herself after that. My mother, with the mind of an accountant, kept track of her lab results on a ledger, right alongside the ledgers for their business and accounting. She felt comfortable with keeping track of the numbers, not how she felt.
She bore her suffering quietly, like many women do, believing it was something to be endured rather than investigated. We often rely on the loudest voices to change the system, but real transformation often rests on the backs of those who suffer silently. Their weight becomes part of the architecture—of families, of healthcare, of collective understanding—until someone, even a child, finds the thread and pulls it into the light.
This week, I’ve noticed the little things. Shifts. Alignments. Not epiphanies, but friction where there used to be silence. I’m standing at a kind of horizon—not of grand revelation, but of work. Of heaviness. There’s a lot to carry, a lot to do. But something is clearer now. The collective muted my weakness for a time. It helped me keep going. But now, outside its hum, I can hear myself again.
And that voice, however tired, is honest too. Maybe even whole. And maybe, if I keep listening, I can carry something back—not just for myself, but to help reshape the tone of the collective, however quietly. Because what we participate in, we also shape. Even if the first step is simply to stop pretending.
Part of not being under that umbrella of health care is realizing just how alone I am with my problems. There’s no checking in, no buffer of assumed care. I’ve decided to adjust my thyroid medication myself. I’m increasing my dose by one and half pills per week and found a lab where I can order my own bloodwork affordably. I feel more awake now—but I’m also a little nervous changing my doses. Still, I wonder why I haven’t fine-tuned it sooner. Sometimes you need the clarity of not having an umbrella.
Thyroid symptoms are so ghost-like, so subjective—I’ve always hated talking about them with my doctor. Because telling the doctor my test results that come back in the normal range is not my normal, is hard to do. But this time, I’ll measure what I can: a calendar where I write down my dosage and how I feel, plus regular lab tests. Hopefully, when it comes time to renew my prescription, this quiet data trail will be enough. Like my mom and her ledger, but with how I feel, not numbers. It’s not ideal. But it’s honest.
I’ve never really been part of the collective, sometimes rejected, sometimes overlooked. I visit the collective, but I don’t live there. I tend to sit between, on the horizon, looking in and out. Clarity rings like a bell here. I hope it rings for you.