​​Many people live with conditions that shape their daily experience profoundly but leave no obvious trace for others to see - chronic pain, fatigue, fluctuating illness, mental health conditions, neurological difference. The assumption that disability can be read from the body at a glance is wrong, and it has costs: disbelief, exclusion, the exhausting labour of having to prove that something real is happening.

LL3 had two conditions - Eagle Syndrome and a severe dental abscess -  that would have caused significant pain, possibly severe and persistent. But pain is among the hardest things to estimate in another person. We cannot measure it from the outside. We are not always good at believing it when it is reported. Research consistently shows that pain - particularly in women, and particularly in those whose bodies do not match assumptions about who suffers and how — is routinely underestimated, minimised, and dismissed. 

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Not all disability is visible.