Hey Reader, I want to talk about a specific kind of guilt this week: the one that shows up right after you decide to stop expecting something of yourself that your body can't deliver anymore. If you've ever lowered a standard for your work, your plans, or your recovery timeline, and immediately felt like you'd given up rather than adjusted, this post is for you. I break down why that reaction happens, what the old expectation was actually protecting underneath the surface, and a few concrete...

Hi Reader, A while back, someone asked me the question everyone asks: "So what do you do for fun?" I opened my mouth and nothing came out. The honest answer had become "manage my body," and I knew that wasn't the answer she wanted. I stood there running through a mental list of things I used to enjoy, trying to figure out which ones were still true. That gap between the version of myself I could still name and the version I could actually live is where this week's post lives. Not the grief of...

Hi Reader, I want to tell you about a kind of grief I didn't have a name for until pretty far into this journey. It's not grief for my health, exactly. It's grief for a person who was already in motion before I got sick. Someone with a trajectory. Plans that made sense. A version of themselves they were actively becoming, one ordinary year at a time. Chronic illness didn't just interrupt that person's plans. It asked me to let them go entirely, without ever asking permission first. For a long...