Hey there Reader, If you've ever hit a wall trying to decide something completely ordinary โ what to eat, whether to rest, how to sequence your afternoon โ 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...
11 days agoย โขย 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...
18 days agoย โขย 1 min read
Hey there Reader, There's a feeling I've been sitting with lately โ 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...
25 days agoย โขย 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 โ and then watched it fall apart the moment your body had other plans โ 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 1 month agoย โขย 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 โ 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....
about 1 month agoย โขย 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 โ 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...
about 2 months agoย โขย 1 min read
Hi, Reader! I want to start with something important: you are not the problem. You've tried harder than most people will ever understand. You've set the alarms, built the schedules, color-coded the planners. You've pushed through symptom days to keep the streak alive. And then your body did what it does, and the whole thing fell apart โ and somehow you ended up feeling like you failed. You didn't. The framework did. The consistency model most of us have been handed assumes something your body...
about 2 months agoย โขย 1 min read
Hi Reader, For a long time, I thought pacing meant cutting back. Doing less. Cancelling more. Shrinking my life until it fit inside my energy. And honestly? That framing made me resist it. What I eventually realized is that pacing with chronic illness isnโt about restriction. Itโs about structure. Itโs about protecting your baseline so youโre not constantly recovering from energy crashes. That shift changed everything for me. Because once pacing became foundational instead of reactive, my...
2 months agoย โขย 1 min read
Hi Reader, When I was first diagnosed, I thought the hardest part would be the symptoms. I was wrong. The symptoms were real, yes. Disorienting. Limiting. Sometimes scary. But what caught me off guard was everything around them. The silence. The well-meaning comments. The identity shift. The subtle pressure to โhandle it well.โ I originally wrote a version of this post in 2024. I recently went back and fully updated it to reflect what I understand now โ with more clarity, more depth, and more...
2 months agoย โขย 1 min read