Pain deserves investigation before identity.

Persistent pain is easier to absorb into an identity than to investigate. You become someone with a bad back, or bad knees, or bad sleep, and once it is part of who you are the questions stop being asked and the possibility of improvement quietly disappears. The label saves effort and costs a great deal.

Take one thing you have accepted as simply how you are and get it looked at properly. Sometimes nothing can be done. Often something can, and nobody was going to check for you.