ðŠI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
ð§ The Work No One Sees
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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 cognitive work â it just never shows up anywhere as work you did. That's what this week's post is about. Not the emotional labor of managing other people's expectations (I wrote about that back in February), but the quieter, more constant overhead of being your own full-time health coordinator. If you've ever felt exhausted in a way that your calendar can't explain, this one might give you some language for it. âRead the full post here â The Hidden Mental Labor of Being Chronically Illâ P.S. â The shop now accepts credit cards, so if you've ever had trouble checking out with PayPal or Venmo, that option is there for you now. |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
ðŠI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Hey Reader, June always comes in louder than I'm ready for. Everyone around me seems to shift into a higher gear â 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 â I want to offer something before you chalk it up to your illness just doing its thing. It might be burnout. And burnout in...
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 â it's moving in more than one direction at once. I updated one of...
Hi Reader, I've been thinking about the moment when the question changes. Not "why do I feel this way" â 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...