đź’ŞI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
🌿 The things no one told me after my diagnosis
|
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 “handle it well.” I originally wrote a version of this post in 2024. I recently went back and fully updated it to reflect what I understand now — with more clarity, more depth, and more honesty about what it actually takes to adjust to life with chronic illness. Because no one really talks about this part. Adjustment doesn’t happen in one brave moment. It unfolds in layers. Over time, I’ve realized there were things I wish someone had gently told me early on. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a worst-case-scenario way. Just in a steady, grounded way that would have made me feel less alone. So I rewrote it. It’s now called: How to Adjust to Life With Chronic Illness: 15 Things No One Tells You​ If you’re in a season of recalibrating, grieving, restructuring, or quietly trying to figure out who you are now, I wrote this for you. You don’t have to do this perfectly. You just have to keep building something that works for your body. |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
đź’ŞI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
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...
Hey there Reader, If you've ever hit a wall trying to decide something completely ordinary — what to eat, whether to rest, how to sequence your afternoon — 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...
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...