I worry so much about other people I often neglect to worry about myself.

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I care so much for other people I often forget to care for myself. I worry so much about other people worrying about me that I choose not to share the ways I’m hurting—both physically and emotionally. I’d always rather suffer in silence. Nothing sounds worse to me than someone else worrying about me. I can’t bear the thought of someone I love staring at their own reflection in their coffee mug, lost in thoughts of Is Eli okay?

I pretended to be fine through every heartbreak. I pretended to be fine for semesters, and sometimes even years.
I am used to being the girl that is fine, and I excel at it too.

I do not know why this is. And it was never really to my own detriment . . . until. It is always until. You are always fine until something happens and wrecks the ship or sinks the life raft. You are always fine until you are not. And then you are a person who is not fine, but also incapable of asking for help, incapable of breaking down—because you are more afraid of other people worrying about you than you are of how it feels to keep all your pain deep inside. So you keep going—heartache after heartache, trauma after trauma, stuffing it all away. It can’t be good for you, but I know no other way.

I have always been fine. Sometimes I think it’s because I had to be; sometimes I think it’s because of birth order, or astrology, or just the way I am.

I am perfect at pretending to be fine. I am amazing at pretending to be okay.

I never want the people I love to worry about me, and I’ve done a stellar job at making sure they don’t. Ask my parents, for one, and they would tell you I am the child they worry about least. Not because there is nothing to worry about, but because I store all the darkness somewhere only I can see it. And for the longest time, this was just a secret I had with myself—I am a superhero. I am perfect at pretending to be fine. I am amazing at pretending to be okay. I am amazing at hiding every bit of pain, every semblance of feeling—just so the people I love don’t have to add me to the list of the people and feelings and heartbreaks they are losing sleep over.

So it is no wonder that the following story went exactly the way it did. It is a cautionary tale, in some ways, about what can happen to you when the plane is going down and you put on someone else’s oxygen mask before your own. It is the story of what happens to the girl who fails to take care of herself because she is always her own last priority.

I love you. I love her. I love us. And I am so sorry.

I am fifteen years old and a hostess at a restaurant, and my favorite person to work with is twenty-one, self-tan-obsessed, and wildly entertaining. She is shiny and adultlike and intentional. I am much like Cher Horowitz in Clueless, a virgin who can’t drive. One interminably long shift during a lull in service, she tells me that when the time does come for me to lose my virginity, I have to PASTAUTI—or pee after sex to avoid UTI.

I never forgot the tip, never forgot her, and in a strange way, am reminded of that interaction every time I pee after sex. I stuck to the rule and went UTI-free for most of my teenage years and young twenties.

I am twenty-four years old, and I get five UTIs in the span of only a few months—and each doubles in intensity and pain. I call my friends who get UTIs all the time because they don’t PASTAUTI. I’m confused because I have the same sexual partner and the same habits I’ve always had. They recommend I use an online prescription platform to chat with a doctor and get a UTI prescription with ease. That’s what they do when they forget to pee after sex and wind up with a burning sensation when they pee a day later. I do it four times, and it works temporarily each time.

But when the fifth UTI rolls around, I make an appointment, figuring that something else may be going on—or that maybe the strain of UTI I had may require an additional or better antibiotic.

They say don’t reason with the unreasonable, and sometimes that is how I feel about my own mind.

It is the end of winter 2023, and I am in so much pain as I hobble to the appointment that I can hardly walk. The heaviness, the burning, the pain in my abdomen (which feels eerily similar but far more intense than a UTI at the same time) is excruciating. The doctors test my pee and, sure enough, find the type of bacteria that isn’t treated by the standard UTI antibiotics; I need something stronger, something more effective. They tell me to clean my vibrators well. They tell me to always remember to pee after sex. They wish me luck and send me on my way. And the antibiotic works, and I go back to taking care of everyone and everything I need to take care of.

And then three weeks later, the pain returns.

I am on a plane back from my alma mater—the University of Michigan—and the pain has magnified, but it is now accompanied by nausea and a level of bloating I’ve never encountered before. I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow on the flight, trying to distract myself from the intensity of the symptoms, which again, make it nearly impossible for me to walk.

The next day, I go to urgent care, and the doctor is male. I point at my right ovary and tell him I think that is where the majority of my pain is coming from. I tell him my appetite is gone. That I’ve been in bed for twenty hours with a heating pad. He sends me for an ultrasound and says he thinks I may have PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), considering my OB-GYN had found cysts on my ovaries in the past. I keep myself on a regime of Advil and Midol, make appointments to meet with a new endocrinologist and a new OB-GYN the next day, and continue to suffer.

Two days later—after receiving a PCOS diagnosis and hearing that my new OB-GYN thought I could also have endometriosis—my pain hasn’t subsided and my appetite has not returned. My mom drives me home from my endocrinology appointment, and my entire body is shaking and I am freezing cold, but I smile and laugh with her and tell her I am okay. I just need to rest.

I had never been to the hospital before for anything other than an anxiety attack I mistook for an inability to breathe. I used to knock on wood when I told people that—out of fear that I might change my fate if I didn’t.

An hour later I spike a fever, and the pain becomes so unbearable that I ask my boyfriend to take me to the emergency room. I had never been to the hospital before for anything other than an anxiety attack I mistook for an inability to breathe. I used to knock on wood when I told people that—out of fear that I might change my fate if I didn’t. I’d never been there for surgery, a broken bone, or an ailment of any kind. I was lucky enough that I’d only ever been to hospitals to visit loved ones. I avoid Grey’s Anatomy like the plague. Turn the other way at the sight of blood. I have been emetophobic (afraid of vomit) since I was a child. So it has been a blessing that I have not had to frequent hospitals throughout my life. Though maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have feared them so much.

At the hospital, a nurse suggests that before seeing the doctor I get an MRI to test for appendicitis. She says she highly doubts I have it, considering I’ve been in pain for days and am not experiencing the typical symptoms of someone with appendicitis, but still, worth checking, considering I identified the majority of the pain to be exactly where the appendix is located. Her eyes are a glass color, and she has a comforting face—like she was born to be a caretaker or a healer—and for the few moments when she pushes me in a wheelchair toward the testing room, I feel unbelievably grateful that she is the nurse on rotation that night.

When I was a kid, appendicitis was my biggest fear. Well, throwing up or seeing someone else throw up was my biggest fear, and my second biggest fear was surgery, and my third biggest fear was the hospital. I also feared other people worrying about me too. Put all of my fears together, and you have my personal fear of all fears: appendicitis. At that moment, though, rolling toward the testing room, I feel strangely calm. She said there isn’t a big chance I have appendicitis, didn’t she? This is probably a cyst that burst or an infection, isn’t it? I haven’t had enough time to prepare for emergency surgery anyway, and I have been a good person, and I haven’t done anything to warrant bad karma, have I?

Maybe you’ve had appendicitis, and maybe you think I’m being dramatic right now. Or maybe you’ve had something way worse, so you cannot possibly comprehend feeling so torn up over a potential appendectomy—one of the most routine, common, simple surgeries done by surgeons daily, worldwide. I validate your feelings and ask you to do your best to open your heart to mine too.

They say don’t reason with the unreasonable, and sometimes that is how I feel about my own mind. I understand that my phobias may seem unreasonable, and for that reason, I often beg them to leave me alone.

At the time, in April of 2023, wearing a pink sweat suit in the hospital waiting room, I didn’t yet know that the phobias and anxieties I was experiencing were actually OCD-related obsessions, which had gone misdiagnosed as anxieties for two decades. I can look at myself in the mirror and tell myself not to be afraid, or that my phobias are invalid, or that I have it so much better than so many other people—but I cannot control the way these fears take over and force me into submission. I cannot explain in so many words how it feels to be controlled, like a player in a video game, by the things that scare me. I only know that it feels like my fears are sharp-toothed cheetahs racing after me—and they are beautiful and shiny, and no matter how far I run, no matter how fast, no matter how well I hide, they will come for me. They can smell me. They could find me if they were blind. I wish some days to be beat up with fists and not thoughts. I wish to be hurt with weapons and not ideas.

You can call me dramatic. Or call me out of touch. You can tell me people have it worse. You can tell me I am being irrational or insane.

All I would say in return is that I want nothing more than to be freed from the psychological prison that I feel trapped in. It makes me feel weak, the way my own brain—one full of so many ideas and creative stimuli—will succeed almost instantly when it tries to take me down.

I want to be strong. I want to be fine. I need to be fine. I have no choice but to be fine.

And behind the closed door, after the party is over, I am curled in a ball trying to will myself into normalcy again.

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From Does Anyone Else Feel This Way? by Eli Rallo. Copyright © 2025 by Eli Rallo. Reprinted by permission of Harvest Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.