My doctors floated all of these potential diagnoses before arriving at the correct one. At my core, I knew none of them were right. But as my symptoms intensified, so did my self-doubt. I needed lucidity to advocate for myself while dealing with an illness that impaired it. I found out the heartbreaking way that a medically confused woman is rarely considered credible.
At the very moment I was losing trust in my own body, I was publicly portraying a character defined by her resilience and endurance. On The Boys, a hit television show that uses the superhero genre to satirize celebrity, politics, and power, I play Annie January, also known as Starlight. She is one of the show’s only earnestly good superheroes. Playing Annie has meant more to me than I can ever articulate. But while filming our precious final season in 2025, I lost her. I lost myself.
Read More: What to Do If Your Doctor Doesn't Take Your Symptoms Seriously
Autoimmune diseases rarely manifest in the same way, person-to-person. The combination of the symptoms I experienced aren’t on cohesive lists online, which just added to my overwhelming confusion and fear at the time.
These symptoms struck me as I was filming the final season of The Boys and more in the public eye than ever. I was going through the physical hell of chronic illness on a public stage. Doing it in private is emotionally damaging enough, but to have my physical symptoms be speculated about, trivialized, and dismissed was devastating.
But even the right diagnosis and treatment could not erase the trauma I endured searching for them. On August 1, 2025, months after beginning treatment, I was hospitalized following a severe mental-health crisis. Ironically, I was not hospitalized at the height of my illness, but in the aftermath. The initial relief I felt once treatment began working slowly gave way to something else entirely: the realization of how absent from myself I had been for the previous two years. I had been hormonally dysregulated, cognitively impaired, and psychologically untethered for so long that recovery didn’t bring me peace. It brought me clarity. And for me, clarity arrived carrying grief. Grief for the time I could not get back. For what this illness had taken from me professionally, creatively, relationally, psychologically. I spent at least two years of my life physically present but mentally unreachable. My grief hit me so hard that there was a moment I was unsure I could carry it. Autoimmune disease does not exclusively exist in our bodies. When your hormones, nervous system, cognition, sleep, and sense of identity have been disrupted for long enough, the psychological consequences are not secondary. They are part of the illness, too.
Treatment has brought so much of me back, physically and emotionally, but recovery has been anything but linear. It has been a constant process of learning to listen to my body instead of overriding it. I used to equate strength with endurance. My identity was wrapped up in pushing through exhaustion and discomfort, remaining productive no matter the cost. But endurance is not the same thing as health. Self-sacrifice is not the same thing as resilience. I used to think strength meant remaining untouched by hardship. Now, a year into treatment, I think it means allowing yourself to be changed by it.
I hope the transparency surrounding my symptoms can help even one person catch their illness earlier than I caught mine. The body speaks long before it screams. Listen to yourself before your body is forced to scream loud enough for the world to hear it, too.
Hence then, the article about my public battle with graves disease nearly destroyed me was published today ( ) and is available on Time ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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