🏥 What it means to have grown up with birth defects or early medical challenges
Growing up with physical differences from birth meant your earliest experiences were marked by medical trauma that your body remembers even if your conscious mind cannot.
You may have learned that your body was something to be worried about and fixed rather than trusted and celebrated. Early physical challenges shaped how your nervous system automatically handles stress—leaving you always scanning for danger, worried about getting sick, or feeling generally on edge. Being separated from your parents early on because of medical needs taught you that people you love might abandon you when you need them most.
You may have developed a complex relationship with your body—sometimes feeling betrayed by it, other times anxiously waiting for something to go wrong. The experience of being "different" from birth still influences how you see yourself in relation to others—at times feeling inferior, but at other times being fiercely defiant about what makes you unique. Your deepest belief is that there's something about you that is inherently flawed—a perception formed before you had words but that continues to shape your relationship with yourself.