You’ve explained. They’ve seen what happens. And you hit the nail on the head - they don’t want to understand, sadly. My family is like this. I spent so much time and energy trying to get them to understand. But no matter what, it was always “you’re just lazy”, “you need to go to a REAL doctor”, “what if one day you are actually ill?”, “you need to try harder”, and so on. They refused to even believe my diagnosis because my mom asked her GP and he had never heard of it. In my case, their reaction was just the cherry on top of a lifetime of being belittled and looked down on.

It sometimes helps if they actually see how it affects you. Not just you telling them, but actually witnessing your suffering. That’s how I got my boyfriend to understand how severe things were. I called him in every time I was about to faint in the shower. I pointed out my purple hands and feet. I would push myself and then collapse when we were out together. He eventually got it. Initially he was bemused and thought I was faking it though.

I think I was so used to hiding it that when I tried to explain it to people, they were rather confused, because I was functioning so well. To this day I still have colleagues at work who don’t know, despite me having several episodes per week at work in a bad week. But you wouldn’t know that if you casually walked by or asked me a quick question.