Chronic illness shows up and robs us of our plans.  It reroutes the itinerary we had for our life.  It steals the future we imagined.  It diminishes our capacities and transforms our circumstances.  It kicks our ass and demonstrates with absolute clarity (in ways that many of us are not accustomed to being shown) that we are absolutely NOT in the kind of control we had thought.  What do you mean accept, lady?!  Why would I want to accept the thing you’ve...

In Gabor Maté’s book When the Body Says, “No,” he talks about the onset of some illnesses like cancer and autoimmune diseases as having a traceable connection to the propensity of “stuffing” negative emotions like fear and anger and the compounding toll that takes on the body.  In it, he discusses Stephen Hawking’s experience with ALS.  Hawking, a remarkable human in so many respects; in particular, Maté is looking at Hawking’s...

 Prior to getting sick, I was an extrovert’s extrovert.  I was a people person who got my needs met by being around people.  When my energy was flagging, I was typically recharged by (you guessed it) being around people.  I have basically zero amount of social anxiety.  In fact, if there is such a thing as solitude anxiety, I have that.  As a child, I shared a room with my sister.  When faced with tasks to do by myself, or afternoons when she was gone...

Chronic fatigue, it sounds like something we’re all suffering from, right?  It seems like everyone is functioning on too little sleep, getting by on fumes, hitting the weekend too tired, stressed, and worn out.  Fatigue seems to be an epidemic.  And yet, when I talk about chronic fatigue syndrome, I’m talking about a whole different animal.  It’s hard to clarify for those who haven’t experienced it the difference between the fatigue that most adults...

I’ve mentioned on my YouTube channel that I feel best when I am mostly eating whole foods – fruits and vegetables, avoiding grains, starches, legumes/beans, and processed foods.   I am not impeccable in my eating.  There are times I have been – from eating squeaky clean and carefully monitoring exactly what and how much of what ingredient went in my system.  That is how I know what seems to work best for my system; What things make me feel worse and what...

Brain fog, the vernacular for the dense cloud that muddies our thinking.  It seems to go along with chronic illness like summer follows spring.  I notice it settling in as I grow more tired or as my pain ramps up.  But I can also just wake up and find it there, lingering like a cloud does at the top of a mountain; hovering and muddling my attempts at recall, quick thinking, memory, language, attention, anything that requires focus.  It seems like so many of my receptors...

As I discussed in my last post, “Do you have a lot of guilt with chronic illness?” guilt and chronic illness are good friends.  They circle one another and are familiar traveling companions.  If you experience chronic illness, you likely know your way around some guilt.  Guilt about not getting things done, guilt about not showing up in the ways you’d like to, guilt over who you once were, who you’d like to be, etc., etc..  Guilt, like so many of...

Yes.

This could be the shortest blog post ever.  I could just leave it at that.  Yes, I have a lot of guilt with chronic illness.  There is guilt on every front.  I’m not the kind of wife, auntie, daughter, sister, friend, niece, employee, neighbor, activist, advocate, community-member, or dog-mama I wish I could be.  This isn’t the path I was on, isn’t the life I imagined, isn’t the future I pictured.  I can load up a guilt-weapon and...

What a strange and amazing question that might be to some.  What’s more amazing is how many answers I have to that question!  There have been so many, and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way.  The crazy-beauty of tremendous hardship is that as life deals us difficult blows it simultaneously hands us these radical blessings.  Yes, I must avail myself to them and be willing to clear the debris from my heart in order to see them, but there they are...

Greetings my dears!  This week we’re digging in to one of the toughest and most frequently asked questions about living with chronic conditions – how to navigate chronic pain.  So tough, so entrenched, so much of an impact on every part of life and one’s ability to function, chronic pain is a many-faceted problem with no easy answers.  For me, my roots of chronic pain are fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome (which causes flu-like pain), my muscle wasting...