So I guess my hesitation is, if my body has already been keyed by the original virus, had a terrible viral load (was positive for longer than I ever imagined), but very few symptoms... I’m fairly proud of my immune response and personally am wondering why I should take aim with a direct mRNA shot, feels unnecessary.

Here’s a discussion with how it all works and relevant links (edit: though I wish there were more sources there. Reader will have to do some work themselves): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27125871

There’s some positing that the vaccine could help or totally stop so-called long covid symptoms. My mom had some long covid symptoms and hasn’t since she got the vaccine.

Also from the link, second exposures to infectious diseases seriously boost the immune systems ability to fight the disease.

It’s like training your immune system once with the exposure and original infection then a second (and third time for Moderna and pfizer) time with the vaccines. In the mRNA vaccine case, they train on a particularly optimal characteristic.

My guess is the vaccine is acting as a placebo for those with long term symptoms. I'm sure eventually we will know more.

Or the long term symptoms are mostly nocebos, and/or the only reason they are regarded as having one cause instead of many (as well as symptoms they would have gotten anyway) is that the person in question knows about "long COVID", or a combination of those and possibly even something that's really causally related.

This needs empirical evidence though. It’s a just-so story without that. Not that I disagree with the prior.