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...
12 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...
19 days 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...
26 days 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 1 month 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 1 month 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...
about 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...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey there Reader, Something I've been thinking about lately — and finally wrote about this week — 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,...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Have you ever had a day where nothing on your list looked that hard — 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...
2 months ago • 1 min read