How we see the world shapes who we choose to be — and sharing compelling experiences can frame the way we treat each other, for the better. This is a powerful perspective.

While some daughters may have memories of accompanying their mothers to their work, my childhood memories are full of mornings assisting my mother at the methadone clinic.

Her brother — my uncle and godfather — helped raise me. He died of a drug overdose in our apartment when I was 15. Though my mother eventually kicked her heroin habit for many years with the help of methadone, she still used cocaine and occasionally crack.

When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and prescribed Dilaudid, an opioid, for her pain, she not only relapsed into opioid addiction, but took my brother with her — offering him her pills until he became hooked, too.

Needless to say, it seems possible that a predisposition toward developing an addiction is in my blood. I didn’t want to risk going down the same path as so many of my family members.

So, for much of my life, I didn’t drink much and steered clear of most drugs, prescription or otherwise.

And yet my outlook eventually evolved.

In 2016, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare connective tissue disorder. The diagnosis explained the premature degenerative damage in my body as well as the severe chronic pain I had started to experience on a daily basis the year before. Up until then, I’d been no stranger to pain, though it was more sporadic and less severe.

I tried many different diets and supplements as well as all sorts of stretches and exercises to help alleviate the pain. I went through several rounds of physical therapy, too, even one with a specialized program for people with chronic pain.

None of these things helped much, if at all. Some even made the pain worse.

I was prescribed gabapentin and then Lyrica, both of which did barely anything to address the pain. Instead, they turned me into a walking zombie who couldn’t string two sentences together.

I called my boyfriend at work and all hours of the night, sobbing that I felt like I was dying and I couldn’t see living in this kind of pain for the rest of my life.

My mobility became so limited at one point, I got a walker and looked into getting a wheelchair.