Hi Reader, If you've ever walked out of an appointment more tired than when you walked in, even though "all you did" was talk for twenty minutes, this one's for you. Advocating for yourself in an appointment isn't one task. It's tracking your symptoms, reading the room, watching your tone, and deciding in real time what's worth pushing on, all while your body may already be running on empty. That's a lot of invisible work that never shows up as "work" from the outside, which is part of why...
12 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, I want to talk about something that comes up in this community more than almost anything else — and still somehow doesn't get named clearly enough. Medical gaslighting. It's what happens when a provider closes the door on investigation before it should be closed — attributing your symptoms to stress, citing your age or body size as the explanation, or treating a partial finding as the whole answer. And if you've experienced it, you probably already know the particular kind of...
19 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with feeling like you're trying to manage your illness well and still somehow falling short. Like you're doing everything you can think of, and it's still not working the way you hoped. This week's post is about the patterns that tend to make chronic illness management harder in pretty consistent ways. Not because anyone is doing something wrong, but because some of these habits emerge almost naturally from living with a chronic...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Have you ever had a day where nothing was technically wrong, but something felt off anyway? Not a symptom exactly. More like a shift. A heaviness you couldn't place, or a flatness that didn't quite make sense. For a long time, I explained those moments away. I'm probably just tired. I'm probably overthinking it. And by the time I was sure something was actually happening, I was already in it. That's what this week's post is about — the early signals your body sends before things...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Summer has a particular way of making everything more visible. The gap between your energy and everyone else's. The trip you over-planned and under-recovered from. The neighbor who wants to talk about their hike while you're calculating whether you have enough in the tank to make lunch. I wrote about this one because it keeps coming up — in my own life, in conversations with readers, in the quiet after a gathering where I left before I wanted to and spent the next day paying for it...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, June always comes in louder than I'm ready for. Everyone around me seems to shift into a higher gear — plans, travel, the general assumption that summer means energy. And every year I notice the same thing: the gap between what the season asks for and what I actually have. If you've been feeling more worn down than usual lately, more flat, harder to recover — I want to offer something before you chalk it up to your illness just doing its thing. It might be burnout. And burnout in...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, Something I've been thinking about lately: so much of the advice out there for chronic illness assumes you're dealing with one thing. One diagnosis, one treatment plan, one set of patterns to learn. But a lot of us aren't living that reality. When you're managing multiple chronic conditions, the rules change. Your diagnoses interact. What helps one thing can aggravate another. Your baseline isn't just unpredictable — it's moving in more than one direction at once. I updated one of...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I've been thinking about the moment when the question changes. Not "why do I feel this way" — but "is this just how it is now." If you've been there, you know the difference. The first question assumes there's a findable answer. The second has stopped assuming that. This week's post lives in the space between those two questions. It's about why most symptom tracking attempts fall apart (and why that's not a consistency problem), what pattern recognition actually looks like when...
2 months ago • 1 min read
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 — know your limits, stop before you're depleted, rest...
2 months ago • 1 min read