Nothing.

There is nothing — no fame, no sympathy, no poverty-level disability support — that makes having Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (MECFS) or Fibromyalgia “worth it.”

The suggestion that we choose this life, that we exaggerate symptoms for attention, for money, or for some imagined secondary gain, is offensive. It’s also dangerous.

You — and others like you — may believe that people living with these conditions are lazy, incapable of coping, or inventing symptoms. But your beliefs are not based in medical fact. They are not grounded in lived reality. And they do real harm.

Patients with MECFS or Fibromyalgia are not “faking” being sick.

If anything, we fake being well — just to survive in a world that refuses to believe us.

Statements like yours — posted publicly, even casually — delay progress. They delay research. They delay care. They push suffering people further into isolation, into silence, and sometimes, into death.

We are not your enemy. But we are harmed when you speak on what you clearly do not — or refuse to — understand.

First, do no harm.

If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

And if you can’t bring yourself to be informed, compassionate, or at the very least neutral, then do this one simple thing:

Stay silent. And stop adding to our pain.