u/late_dancer

I don't know if it became worse after I began taking birth control, or if my body was already like this, but it feels like all my ligaments have become so loose that nothing is keeping my body together anymore.

It feels like everything is just melting and falling apart. Honestly, I find myself avoiding almost everything except lying down because anything else causes pain. But at the same time, my muscles are constantly tense.

I feel like one-on-one PT or Pilates would probably help, but I can't really afford to invest that much money into it right now. So I've spent basically the whole day looking for group Pilates classes instead.

I've been dancing for years, so I have a pretty good sense of how to move my body, and I feel like a group class could be helpful for me. At the same time, I worry that a class that's too difficult could trigger a flare-up. I've been trying to consider everything — time, cost, and location — and I still couldn't make a decision today. I ended up wasting the entire day just trying to figure it out. And my ADHD brain just can't make decisions, lol. My brain is basically splattered on the floor alongside the rest of my body.

My body has been really weird these days. I take ballet classes regularly, and it seems that I lost my extensions and stanima. I know what my body is supposed to do and how it's supposed to feel like, but my brain ain't braining, and my body ain't bodying. It almost seems as if I lost years of progress. Maybe It became this severe after taking almost 2 weeks off because of severe cold?

Before we started dating, we talked about our values, and I told my boyfriend multiple times that I have no desire to have biological children.

We've been dating for about four months now, and my boyfriend told me that if we get married, he's going to impregnate me.

He's 25, unemployed, and still a sophomore in college. I'm 23 and in my final year of university.

I live in South Korea, which is still pretty conservative in many ways. There's still a strong expectation that men should "carry on the family line," while women are expected to work and take care of the house and children at the same time.

And of course, pregnancy and childbirth can put enormous pressure on women's careers. There isn't really much protection from workplace pressure around pregnancy and childbirth, and many women end up having to give up the profession they originally wanted to pursue.

I'm angry, but I'm also having a hard time processing what he said. Is this really something he thinks he can joke about? And if he was joking, how am I even supposed to explain to him how deeply upsetting this is to me?

If what he actually loves is the idea of a future where I fulfill all the roles expected of me as his wife and the mother of his children, rather than loving me, I wouldn't have had sex with him or invested this much time, money, and emotional energy into this relationship in the first place.

I don't even know what else to say. I just needed to rant.

Hi everyone.

I'm a 23-year-old woman from South Korea, and I've been wondering if I'm making the right decision by seeing a medical geneticist.

I've been hypermobile my whole life. As a kid, I had IBS, episodes of overwhelming fatigue where I would suddenly have to sleep, and I always had much worse muscle soreness after exercise than the people around me.

About three years ago, I developed severe pain and could barely walk for a while. I saw several doctors and received diagnoses like scoliosis and myofascial pain syndrome, but nobody could explain why.

During rehab, I started researching my symptoms and realized I'm hypermobile with a Beighton score of 9/9. It was also the first time I realized that living with pain all the time wasn't normal.

Now, I have chronic joint pain, constant muscle pain, fatigue, and significant joint instability. I'm also a dancer, and the instability and poor proprioception have become a huge limitation. I was also diagnosed with ADHD.

The hardest part has been trying to get anyone to take hypermobility seriously.

HSD is barely recognized in South Korea, and even EDS isn't familiar to most doctors. For years I've been told things from DOCTORS like, "Being flexible is a good thing," "Why would flexibility hurt?," "You're just anxious," or "There's nothing we can do anyway." When I brought medical papers about HSD, they brushed me off, saying they never heard of a such thing and treated like I have health anxiety.

Eventually, I got a referral. Even though the doctor seemed skeptical, she told me to go to one professor in medical genetics because they have experience with Marfan syndrome and a few EDS cases.

So now I have an appointment next March. (Yes... next March. 🫠)

I don't think I have hEDS. HSD seems much more likely. But I honestly don't know who else in my country would understand hypermobility.

Some days, the pain is so bad that even taking public transportation leaves me in bed for the rest of the day. At my worst, the pain has been overwhelming enough to lead to suicidal thoughts.

I also have C-PTSD, and growing up, I was usually ignored or scolded whenever I said I was sick or in pain. After years of being dismissed—both at home and by doctors—I'm honestly scared this appointment will end the same way.

Part of me wonders if I'm overthinking all of this, or if I'm just wasting limited medical resources by taking an appointment that should go to someone who's actually sicker than I am. I don't know why seeking help feels so frightening.