Hi there Reader, Can I tell you about a recent dinner at my house? Frozen chicken. Microwave mac and cheese. A bag of frozen broccoli. There was a vegetable on the plate, so it counted. And honestly, that was the whole standard that night. I've been thinking a lot lately about the gap between what pacing is supposed to look like and what it actually looks like when you're living inside a real day. The ideal version sounds reasonable enough â know your limits, stop before you're depleted, rest...
12 days ago âĒ 1 min read
Hey there Reader, Something I've been thinking about lately â and finally wrote about this week â is how energy tracking advice almost always skips the part where it tells you what to do when the data doesn't lead to a fix. Most of it assumes you're starting from neutral. That a bad day is an outlier to troubleshoot. That if you just find the right system and stay consistent, you'll get ahead of your crashes. For a lot of us, that's not how it works. And when tracking is built on that logic,...
18 days ago âĒ 1 min read
Hi Reader, Have you ever had a day where nothing on your list looked that hard â and you still couldn't get through it? That's what this week's post is about. Not the flare day, not the obvious crash. The day that just feels heavier than it should, and you can't quite point to why. I've been sitting with this one lately. There's something in my own life I'm not ready to name specifically, but it's been quietly occupying space in the background of every day. And what I keep noticing is how...
26 days ago âĒ 1 min read
Hey there Reader, If you've ever hit a wall trying to decide something completely ordinary â what to eat, whether to rest, how to sequence your afternoon â and felt genuinely depleted by it, this week's post is for you. Decision fatigue is a real and researched phenomenon. But most of what's been written about it was designed for people whose decision-making day starts fresh. Ours doesn't. By the time we get to the "normal" decisions of the day, we've already run through a full round of...
about 1 month ago âĒ 1 min read
Hey Reader, This week's post started with a question I've been sitting with for a while: why does managing a chronic illness feel like a full-time job even on days when nothing happens? The answer, it turns out, is that something is always happening. It's just invisible. Tracking symptoms. Researching. Translating what your body is doing into language that will be taken seriously in a twelve-minute appointment. Holding a hundred administrative details that no one else is holding. This is real...
about 1 month ago âĒ 1 min read
Hey there Reader, There's a feeling I've been sitting with lately â the one that shows up when you've been managing your health for a long time and it's still hard. Not "new diagnosis" hard. The quieter, lonelier kind of hard. The "I should have this figured out by now" kind. I wrote about it this week, and I want to be honest: it's one of the posts I've needed to write for a while. Not because I have a tidy answer, but because I think a lot of us are carrying that feeling without much...
about 2 months ago âĒ 1 min read
Hey Reader, There's something I've been wanting to write about for a while, and this week I finally did. If you've ever bought a planner hoping it would be the thing that finally worked â and then watched it fall apart the moment your body had other plans â this one's for you. Because the problem was never your follow-through. It was never your discipline or your motivation or your willingness to try. It was a framework that was never built for a body like yours. And there's a real difference...
about 2 months ago âĒ 1 min read
Hi Reader, Can I tell you something I wish someone had said to me early on in my diagnosis? Changing the plan isn't failing. It's actually one of the most important skills you can build when you're living with chronic illness. For a long time, I treated flexibility like a last resort â something I reluctantly reached for when my body left me no other choice. And every time I used it, I felt guilty about it, like I was somehow proving that I couldn't handle things the way I was supposed to....
2 months ago âĒ 1 min read
Hey Reader, I want to ask you something. When was the last time you rested without negotiating with yourself first? Not rested because you'd finally done enough, or because you crashed and had no choice â but just rested because your body asked for it and you said yes. If you're like most of the people in this community, that's a hard question to answer. Because somewhere along the way, we all absorbed the same message: rest is a reward. You earn it. And if you haven't done enough yet, you...
2 months ago âĒ 1 min read