Member-only story
Chronic Illness Taught Me to Redefine ‘Progress’
After years of frustration, I’m taking control in spite of my health
Chronic illness, for a while, broke my brain.
I say that not to reduce mental health to something glib and dramatic, but to accurately report how it felt to finally break under the weight of being permanently sick. The whole of my adult life has been marked by illness — from autoimmune diseases and anemia to stomach surgeries, inner ear disorders, and vagus nerve dysfunction. The two most persistently terrible forces in my life are fibromyalgia and arthritis, which have left me off-and-on requiring the use of a cane, injections of immunosuppressors, and drastic lifestyle changes to maintain chronic pain and mobility issues. After years of trying and failing to manage these conditions, I woke up one day with the sensation of having been dropped and shattered.
But my brain didn’t break from sickness itself. Rather, it’s all the things chronic illness carries with it: the stress of handling doctors, insurance, bills, isolation, communicating with friends and family, forgoing things I love, and — more than anything — staring futility, ambiguity, and a lack of progress in the face. The inability to experience any progress, to consistently have to lie to loved ones about feeling better, was what really…
