I have to admit, this is not what I expected from life. When asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” never in a million years would my answer be sick. The warped perceptions people have of chronic illnesses doesn’t settle well with me and it causes me daily anxiety. I feel like I lead this double life. On one hand I’m educated and appear to be put together, on the other hand I feel as though it’s all just pretend. I suppose some days it’s not pretend and I actually do beleive that I’m super-woman….yet there are so many days where the frustration takes me over that I can’t really be “normal” and never will be “normal”.
I had hoped that this last surgery would be the end to my pain, but also knew that my problems would be ongoing. what I didn’t realize is that within a year of this surgery I would trade my ovary for more diseases. Sure, I’ve suspected PCOS and some sort of autoimmune disease for a long time, but now it’s becoming a reality. And you know what scares me the most? Not what these things will do to me…but what OTHERS will think of me. How family, friends, co-workers will perceive me if or when they find out I’m still sick after all these health problems and that my last surgery just helped a bit but didn’t cure anything. I feel weird admitting that it’s about what others think of me, but it really is. To me a diagnosis is just putting a name to something I’ve felt for the last ten years. To others it lables me, and not in a positive way either. Yet because all of my problems aren’t apparent to everyone I feel like everyone thinks I’m full of shit or just pretending to be “sick”. That I’m a hypocondriac or that I’m overreactitng. Of course I have thought through all of these possiblities quite often and know they aren’t the case. Yet I know people think that about me. Or that I’m just lazy and that’s why I sleep so much. I could go on and on about what people think.
The question is…why do I care? and truly I don’t know how to answer that. I feel that I have lost a lot from being sick, but I also feel that there has been insight that I have gained. So there have been some positive benefits to what I’ve gone through even though I sense a loss of what USED to be my life. It seems like looking at someone elses life now. I am a completely different person than I was before. There is good and bad aspects to this so I try to focus on the good. I do end up greiving the loss of things that once were…friendships that are no longer, energy I used to have, optimism and so on. I greive these things like a death. Some days I’m angry, some days I’m sad, some days I’m ok.
I’m walking foreward and trying to be a little easier on myself. I keep trying to remember what I have gained by being sick not what I have lost. This is one of my biggest battles. I often focus on what I’ve lost, what people think of me and get sucked in and think those things of myself. I’ve always been hard on myself, so now imagine how it is to be hard on yourself when you can’t actually meet your own standards? physically I can’t do the things I want to, I run out of energy, I get sore, I get sick…..then I get frustrated because I have let myself down. For the longest time I thought things weren’t going well because I wasn’t trying hard enough, because I wasn’t working hard enough, because I just was being lazy or overreacting to situations. I had “friends” telling me that everyones life was hard, mine was no different, I just had to try harder and not be so depressed or anxious. Even though I was trying my hardest. I now know that advice was well meant, but came from someone who couldn’t comprehend what it was like to have a chronic illness AND deal with life at the same time.
Since then I have learned of the Spoon Theory, which explains what I go through in the most basic terms possible. I wish I had known it a long time ago and been able to show it to people who might have cared to read it.
Perhaps I will always care what others think about me being sick all the time. I hope that someday I won’t care, or the people that I fear view me as lazy or a hypocondiac will just not be in my life anymore. I would rather surround myself with support. I have enough skeptisism on my own to go around.
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