Sharing my story

Writing about my journey with chronic illness has been both therapeutic and difficult for me. Many times, processing my pain and recovery is more easily done when I start writing about it. Other times, the stage of recovery in which I have found myself is so full of complex emotions and thoughts, that stitching them into words coherent to another person, even one on a similar journey, is just impossible. 

So I have been upfront when writing this blog, letting you know that my posts might come more sparingly as the journey's direction changes. When I started going to therapy and working on the grieving component of my illness, I was honest with you, letting you know that I wasn't always going to write about the process, I would have to keep parts of it private. That's the stage I was in most of this spring, sorting my own thoughts out and wondering if I'd ever be able to put them into words. Or if I would ever really want to, if I would want to open that story up to my readers. 

I'm still not sure of those answers but I do know one thing: my journey, no matter how lonely it can feel sometimes, is remarkably universal. I've noticed this year, that nearly every single one of my friends my age has faced a tumultuous struggle, new to them and hard to overcome. Some of my friends have faced their first encounters with mental illness and learned that asking for help in treating anxiety and depression is a brave action. Other friends have experienced their first challenging semester in school, realizing that academic success is not the most important success to living. Finally, during my last week in college, I met a freshman at WAC who experienced her own health crisis this year and who had been reading my blog the entire time. She told me about her long process of diagnosing her Crohn's disease and how my story, one so similar to her own, kept her in school. She started reading about my story when our Peer Mentor Instagram posted about it in August and continued to follow it as the year progressed. She told me that all year, she had been working up the courage to talk to me, as she watched me wheel myself around campus and finish my undergrad. She told me she prayed for me when she saw the ambulance come for me in March. She even told me she was proud of me for graduating. This was a conversation I had in the dining hall just a few days before graduating. 

I exchanged phone numbers with that girl and told her to keep in touch with me after graduating. I told her that she was brave for continuing to fight her chronic illness. I told her that she could not imaging how much her words meant to me. She may have thought I was being hyperbolic, but I wasn't. I truly didn't have the words to tell her how perfect her timing was. She had no way of knowing how much I'd been struggling that day. She had no way of knowing how incompetent and insignificant and frustrated I felt. Or maybe she did know, and that's why she shared her thoughts with me. Maybe she knew that I needed to hear that my story could help others or that I had been helping her, just by sharing my experience. 

Either way, her words were rejuvenating. She was a reminder, grounding me again. On days when I feel unproductive and broken and insignificant, I will remind myself to write. I will remind myself that I have a purpose, even if it is just sharing my story, advocating for myself and those who cannot stand for themselves, and helping others understand the lives of the chronically ill and disabled. I don't know if I believe in fate or that things happen for a reason, but I do believe in glasses being half full and making lemonade, even out of the most rotten lemons. So if I have to continue being ill, I might as well find a purpose in it.