How Vulnerability Can Spark Strength: Inspiring Others Through Sharing Your Struggles

The 30-day challenge continues as I share one thing that I personally struggle with.

As part of my goals for 2024, I aim to share more about myself through my writing and provide readers with a better understanding of the person behind my articles. Although I believe I have already made some progress in my writing journey, there is still much more room for improvement. During my brainstorming session, I came across the concept of 30-day challenges, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to achieve my goal. Today is the seventh day of my thirty-day challenge.

Prompt #10: Share something you struggle with.

This was an interesting prompt, as I could think of several areas that I struggle with, but I will talk about an area that has had a significant impact on my life.

Our health is something we can take for granted until we don’t have it, and then it means the world and can become something that fills our thoughts and lives. I still remember when I was a teen, and I was struggling with ridiculous amounts of exhaustion, and all it took for me to gain weight was to look at junk food the wrong way.

It was a mystery what was wrong, but I would routinely sleep 14-plus hours a day and still wake up tired. I remember sharing with my parents for months, if not years, about feeling off and tired, but we never thought anything of it.

It took me at least six months to visit a doctor in the hopes of finding something out. The doctor ran numerous tests, such as ultrasounds, CT scans, etc., to try and discover what was wrong. It wasn’t until they ran a comprehensive blood panel and looked for everything that they discovered I had hypothyroidism.

Hypothyroidism is a condition where your thyroid isn’t producing enough hormones to maintain a healthy level of hormones in your body. It can cause numerous symptoms, and among those are both tiredness and weight gain. It also helped explain the memory issues I was experiencing. My doctor said he thought I had it for a while due to the severity of the symptoms I was experiencing.

Luckily for me, the fix was simple enough. All I needed to do was take a pill called Levothyroxine. This pill is a synthetic replacement for the hormone I was missing out on. I will have to take this pill for the rest of my life.

Thankfully, the fix was nothing major, but it forever changed how I view my health and how I will not take it for granted. I am thankful we were able to discover the issue, and the solution was something that was affordable and not anything severe. Health is truly the most important thing we have. Hypothyroidism still impacts me to this day but I am thankful I can feel better than I did due to the miracles of modern medicine.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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