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 there Reader, There's a feeling I've been sitting with lately â 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...
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 â and then watched it fall apart the moment your body had other plans â 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...
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 â 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....