💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
🕯️ The Grief No One Names
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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 time I thought accepting my diagnosis meant that grief was supposed to go away. That if I'd really made peace with being sick, I wouldn't still feel a pull toward who I might have been. It took me a long time to understand that acceptance and grief aren't opposites. I can fully live in my current reality and still feel a wave of loss for that other version of myself, on the same Tuesday, without either one being less true. If that's familiar to you too, you're not carrying something unusual. You're carrying something real that almost nobody names out loud. More soon, |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Hi Reader, Somewhere in my first year or two after diagnosis, I caught my own reflection and had this small, strange thought: I don't totally recognize this person. Not dramatic. Just a quiet double-take. Patience running differently. Energy running differently. Even my sense of humor felt rewired somehow, in a way I couldn't fully explain to anyone who hadn't lived it. For a while I tried to fix it, like enough effort could get me back to exactly who I was before. What actually helped was...
Hey Reader, Some days the routine just isn't happening. Pain's louder than usual, brain fog's thick, or there's no reason at all, just that heavy exhaustion that tells you today's going to look different. I used to try to push through those days anyway. It never worked. I'd end up more burned out, in more pain, and further behind than if I'd just adjusted in the first place. So I stopped. Now I've got three versions of my routine ready to go, depending on what the day actually gives me, and a...
Hi Reader, I hope your August is treating you kindly, because mine has been a lot lately. Between my husband's work schedule shifting around him lately, our community volunteer commitments ramping up for fall, and my own Tuesday choir practice, dinner has become the one thing I genuinely don't have extra energy left for by the time evening rolls around. And that's before my GI issues decide to flare and toss the whole plan out anyway. So this month, I stopped trying to plan meals and started...