I didn't have health insurance for a long time. I had it growing up through my parents, but there's always this weird sense of "fix yourself, don't waste resources". It may have been a holdout from the scarcity of services my parents grew up with in rural Mexico and Central America.

I got hit with a really bad chronic disease that I've been dealing with for over a decade. It manifests in so many weird, seemingly unrelated ways because it's systemic. As I traversed the world of professional medical treatment, I initially felt the rapture of attention. "Oh my God, doctors are like magic. They are literally just focused on making me feel better!"

As I continued, and initial treatments lost efficacy or side effects became intolerable, my hope became overwhelmed with a feeling of resignation. I was thoroughly convinced that doctors can fix things, and that is the signal everything and everyone in society communicates. "But why am I still fucked up? Why am I on treatment #7? Why am I on procedure #3? Why am I out thousands of dollars and seemingly in the same spot I was when I started all of this?"

I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I stopped looking to them for answers. In the middle of this year's long resignation, I happened to hear an interview on NPR with a doctor. She said, "I think doctors really need to be more open with the fact that there's things we can't fix. There's things we don't know. Trust disintegrates when people approach us expecting miracles, and we fail to temper those expectations. It's hard to tell someone, 'I am an expert at X but I have no idea how to fix X." That was revelatory to me.

I felt anger when doctors would prescribe me Tylenol or antibiotics or off-label depression medicine. "How the fuck are antibiotics going to fix this?!" I realized that those reactions were because I'm the kind of person that needs to know the chain of logic that leads to a conclusion. I would be so much more amenable to unintuitive treatments if the doctors had taken a second to tell me, "JAMA concluded that a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as effective as tramadol. In addition, I'm going to prescribe you these OTC's because you're young and you have a high risk of opiate abuse." Oh, that is such sound logic that I'm 100% on board with following your orders.

Since I realized that, I now know what to ask and what to research when being treated. I know what my brain needs to be convinced. I know my mind's extreme hesitance to take information on faith. I gained more compassion for conspiracy theorists and radical subjectivists. Yeah, they filled their brain with bullshit from Facebook, but maybe the authority figures they relied on failed to recognize the frames from which they operate.

I don't know if reading about my experience helps anyone. Ultimately, I realized that "be your own advocate" is a tremendously powerful way to operate. For the most part, authority figures and elites aren't trying to bullshit us into complacency. They have to juggle efficiency and effectiveness, and sometimes our individual pecadillos get lost in the mix. The things societies have achieved are because individuals joined in collective efforts, and flat-out ignoring or rejecting that momentum can lead to unnecessary strife and suffering for us individually.

If you're on HN, you're probably super smart. Try to decode what your brain needs. If your conclusions seem to be in contradiction to the world's signals, maybe slow down and entertain ways of convincing yourself of what the signals are telling you. Your mind is powerful, it can hold contradictory facts. Trust in that.