Hello and welcome to another episode of Iway with Jameela Jamel, a podcast against shame.

I hope you're well and I hope you enjoyed today's episode. It's one that you've been asking for for ages

and it just took me a while to find the right guests and I definitely did.

I wanted to be very specific because it's a subject that is so personal to me

because of my experience with chronic illness. I have a list of anosendrome. I have HGDS

which means I have the hypermobile type. So, Aylis, Danos, and Dome is a connective tissue disorder

and we get into it more when we talk in the episode. But mine also means that I'm hypermobile

so I dislocate a little of the time and I'm overly stretchy, not in like a sexy fun way.

It can be sexy and fun I guess. But it's also very painful and very scary and problematic

sometimes, especially if you're trying to have a big fun life and career which I am.

And so I talk in quite a lot of detail about my personal experience with that chronic health condition

and it doesn't really matter what the specificities are of each chronic health condition.

We are all in this together because we will have the shared experience of trying so hard

not to feel completely persecuted, of not just giving up every single day,

feeling like nobody understands you and nobody's careful enough with you

and especially if it's a chronic health condition in which you look okay.

Similarly with mental health, if you don't look the way we think mentally ill person looks

and people just don't receive you with care or sympathy or even belief, they just gaslight you.

And that's a massive part of how chronic health doesn't just eat away your body,

it can eat away your mind and the only way to really stop that is to be able to come together

and share our experiences and sort of ungasly each other.

And that's exactly what you hear two women who've never met before do in this chat.

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