All the bullshit I’ve been through with doctors, meds, physical therapists, school administrators and nurses, wondering if I’ll actually graduate, putting off college, the inability to celebrate my own birthday, missing out on important events with friends, having no social life, not getting my driver’s license until I was 18, not participating in normal high school activities like prom, becoming a jaded, apathetic, cynical person, and you think I wouldn’t trade all of that to be normal because of some aloof sense of superiority due to the fact that chronic illness isn’t a regular occurrence among the human race?
You think any of us wouldn’t trade all the pain we’ve been through, emotional and physical, just because we’d be like everyone else, normal, if we didn’t have it?
There is much more to myself and a lot of other chronically ill people than our illnesses, and if you would rather be sick than normal, well congratulations on being really special.
Before you flip shit at me and call me “really special” because that’s not offensive lol, maybe consider the way you take a post may not actually be the posts meaning.
Honestly I do often take the mindset of the original post- not because I want to be sick. On the contrary, I would LOVE to have days without chronic pain or the threat of collapsing in public. It would be incredible to not take a handful of pills every day just to function at a somewhat productive level.
But that’s not realistic. I can wish all I want, but my migraines aren’t going away any time soon.There is no cure for narcolepsy. I don’t want to be sick, of course, though I’m fed up with people acting like I should be constantly grief-stricken and loathing of my illness. There are people who will insist I’m not really as sick as I say I am because I don’t spend every waking moment hating my illness.
In reality, I try to keep that despair out of my mind, even though it is the first feeling to rise when I think about my illness. There is no cure for my illness(es)- giving in to the grief and frustration will do me no good. There’s nothing I can do to be cured, so why on earth would I let myself continue to be perpetually miserable?
I’m chronically ill. I don’t want to be, but I am. Me being ill won’t change any time soon.
I refuse to hate myself for something that I can’t control and can’t get rid of. I refuse to hold on to the daydreams of being healthy- all they do is make me feel worse because I know I can’t get rid of my illness. It’s just not realistic to constantly hope and wish I’ll get better. It just traps me in a desperate mindset.
So I swallow the truth. It takes a lot of time and I still am not perfect, but over time I learned to accept my illness while also acknowledging I’d give anything to be without it. I learn to be able to enjoy life instead of spending every waking second longing for an impossible outcome. Every day I do all I can to get away from that pitfall of self-pity.
And yet, able-bodied people love to drag us back to that awful mindset, whether they mean to or not. They expect us to live in that constant state of misery, as if we couldn’t possibly enjoy anything as long as we’re ill. And you know what? I would have been inclined to agree at some point. But I’ve worked my ass off to be away from that state of mind.
I am sick. I hate being sick.
Though do you want to know what I’m really sick of?
People treating me like my entire life has to revolve around pining for the impossible instead of striving to be as functional as I can- not focusing on the incurable, but how I can live a fulfilling life in spite of an illness I cannot get rid of.
