The Collision: What a Decade of “I’m Fine” Looked Like for Me

A gentle note: this post includes abuse, serious illness, and loss. Take what helps, leave the rest.

Are you currently caring for someone: a kid, a parent, a partner, or all three? And has anyone asked, this month, who’s caring for you?

Caregiving is one of the fastest ways to burn out a nervous system that’s already been running on empty since childhood, and most of the women reading this have been doing it since long before anyone gave it that name. My body started keeping score decades before my life did.

In 2004 I was diagnosed with an irregular heart rhythm and was fainting regularly because of it. In fact, my heart rate would top 220 beats a minute in my sleep. I had my first ablation, which is a surgical procedure to prevent the chaotic rhythms. I dismissed it as what my grandmother, who lived to be 87, had all her life. Medication worked for her. I was just extra.

In 2012, a horseback riding accident caused a brain bleed that took six months to recover from. By 2014 my arrhythmia was back, and I had two more ablations, six weeks apart. The second one left me with severe inflammation around my heart, and then chronic inflammation, called pericarditis, flaring every three to six months from then on. If that sounds painful and scary, that’s because it is.

I turned forty in December of 2016. Two months later, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I started driving two and a half hours each way, multiple times a week, to every appointment to make sure she received the best care, all while running a business with employees depending on my income. My eight-year marriage was already abusive. When I started caring for my mother, the abuse got worse. That was the last straw. I filed for divorce and I was an absolute wreck. I was 40 years old and 90 pounds overweight from recurrent rounds of steroids to keep my pericarditis at bay.

Here’s the two of us in a photo from that season: my mother flashing an “I’m fine” sign from her first chemo infusion for one of the deadliest cancers known to man, and me sitting next to her, just smiling away, at my highest weight of 220 pounds. Neither of us was fine. We were just both really good at performing fine. That was about the time my precious five-year-old niece asked me if I was pregnant.

So I got serious about taking care of my body, mind, and soul, and joined a twelve-step program at my church that cracked open just how many of my “normal” life choices had actually been trauma responses. Like many of my choices in men.

On Christmas Eve of 2018, I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. Her death set us both free: her from her suffering, and me to finally say out loud what had actually happened in that house when I was growing up. My trauma work began in earnest.

Then in March of 2020, my entire industry got shut down overnight. My mother was gone. My father couldn’t help. I had never received child support. That same January, right before the shutdown, I’d been hospitalized with autoimmune hepatitis. My own immune system was attacking my liver, but nobody thought to test for lupus.

In 2022, I cared for my father through his thirty-day battle with cancer before he died. That same year, I finally connected the dots in my own body: the pericarditis, the hepatitis, the inflammatory pain, the exhaustion. A rheumatologist confirmed it. Systemic lupus.

I didn’t just have a bad decade. I had a collision of unresolved trauma and midlife burnout, and through every single year of it, I told everyone, including myself, that I was fine. My body was screaming as loud as it could for help, because the load I had been carrying for far too long was just too much to sustain.

What a 9 means

I have nine adverse childhood experiences. That’s what’s called an ACE score, and here’s what the research says it does.

• A 2025 study of over one hundred and eight thousand women found that every additional ACE raised the risk of autoimmune disease, with lupus specifically among the conditions most strongly affected.
• A 2021 review of over four hundred thousand people found that four or more ACEs more than doubles your risk of developing cancer as an adult.
• A thirty-eight-year study following over forty-six thousand people found that four or more ACEs raised the risk of dying before your time by forty-five percent.

Childhood trauma doesn’t just live in memory. It shows up in bloodwork, in imaging, in the chart, decades later.

Want to understand how that happens? Read how trauma affects the body, in plain language.

If any of this sounds familiar, close to home, or like something you’ve been managing quietly for a long time, you’re not alone in it, and you were never meant to carry it alone.

If you are in crisis or thinking about suicide, please reach out right now to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. You matter, and help is available.

This is the second post in a four-part series. Next: what finally moved the needle after a decade of managing symptoms instead of resolving them.

This is my personal story, not a typical result or a promise. Everyone’s healing is different. This is education, not therapy. Yvette Brown is a Marriage and Family Therapist Trainee at Attune Center for Healing and supervised by Christina Whitney, LMFT #111050.