I knew exactly how I was going to describe the numbness in my hands, the exhaustion that sleep never seemed to touch, the strange moments when my body felt like it belonged to someone else. I practiced saying it calmly because I didn’t want to sound dramatic, and I reminded myself not to cry because I didn’t want to seem too emotional. I even decided which symptoms I would leave out, because I was afraid that there were too many, and that it would be too much to share. By the time the doctor walked into the room, I was hoping for answers and hoping to be believed.

A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis had finally given my symptoms a name, but it hadn’t erased the feeling that I needed to prove they were real. Every doctor’s appointment had become an audition. I rehearsed before I arrived, edited myself mid-sentence, and instead of questioning the doctor when they had a skeptical expression, I questioned myself. Did I explain it clearly enough? Was I making my symptoms sound worse than they were? Was I taking up too much of his time? Slowly, almost without noticing, I stopped trusting the person who knew my body best, which was me.

Eventually, I asked myself: “Am I even worthy of being believed?” That shift doesn’t announce itself, but once it happens, everything changes. You stop listening to what your body is trying to tell you, explain away symptoms, convince yourself you’re just tired or stressed or being too sensitive, and you get so used to carrying pain that you stop believing you deserve relief.

I ignored symptoms for weeks, sometimes months, telling myself they weren’t serious enough to mention. I downplayed pain to my family because I didn’t want to worry anyone, and because part of me had started to wonder if I was just being dramatic. I convinced myself over and over again that I was overreacting, that other people had it worse, that I should be able to push through. By the time I finally had answers, I had spent years talking myself out of what my own body had been trying to tell me.

As Black women, so many of us learn to do this long before we ever walk into an exam room. It’s not something a doctor teaches us. It’s something we absorb much earlier, in the messages we receive about what it means to be strong, about who is allowed to rest and who is expected to keep going. We are raised to endure, to carry, to show up for everyone around us without asking for much in return. And when you spend a lifetime being taught that your discomfort is something to push through rather than something to pay attention to, you stop paying attention to it. Because you’ve learned that your pain isn’t the priority.

After my diagnosis and brain surgery, I thought healing would begin with treatment, but what I discovered instead was that the hardest part had nothing to do with medicine. It had to do with learning to trust myself again.

As I started sharing my story on Instagram through Marti’s MS Life, a platform I created to document my experience living with MS, I thought I was just trying to process what had happened to me. But then something unexpected happened. Women began finding me online, and what they said stopped me in my tracks. They told me their own stories, stories that sounded different on the surface but carried the same wound underneath. One message in particular has stayed with me, from a woman who said she had spent so long being dismissed that she had started scheduling her symptoms, waiting to see if they were still there in a few weeks before she let herself take them seriously. She didn’t want to bother anyone. She didn’t trust herself enough to say something sooner. I remember reading that and feeling something crack open, because I knew exactly what she meant. I had done the same thing.

That was the moment I understood that this wasn’t just my story, it was every woman who had learned to shrink their own experience to make others more comfortable. That understanding became the foundation for All in My Head, a documentary that centers the experiences of Black women specifically, because we are so rarely the ones centered in conversations about chronic illness, about being dismissed, about what it costs to spend years doubting yourself. I didn’t make it to tell a story about multiple sclerosis. I made it because I needed Black women to see themselves on screen and know that what they had been carrying was real.

People ask me when healing began, and the honest answer is that it wasn’t the day I got my diagnosis, or after surgery, or even when I finally found the right treatment. Healing began when I started finding my way back to myself. Back to the quiet voice that had been there all along. The one I had been taught not to trust. I believe her now.

Marti Hines is the Founder of H Collective, a documentary filmmaker, keynote speaker, and storyteller using the power of narrative to advance health equity and transform conversations around chronic illness.