They were teaching me, systematically, to distrust my own perception, so that the evidence my body kept collecting would be overwritten, each time, by their confident story.

And it very nearly worked, not because I was foolish, but because that is precisely how it is designed to work, on anyone.

So if you take one thing from these pages, let it be this: when your own experience and a trusted person’s confident explanation keep disagreeing, month after month, the problem is not that you are imagining things.

Your perception is data.