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Learning to meet difficult emotions with care while living with chronic illness Living with chronic illness means living with more than symptoms. Alongside the physical realities, there is an emotional landscape that shifts constantly. Frustration, grief, fear, disappointment, loneliness, anger, relief, hope. Some days these emotions appear quietly. Other days they arrive all at once, layered on top of each other in ways that are difficult to untangle. Many people who live wi

How living with autoimmune disease and chronic pain shifted my definition of achievement from productivity to sustainable effort There was a time when I defined success by output. How much I accomplished. How productive I was. How many boxes I checked by the end of the day. Success lived outside of me. It was measured by visible milestones, completed tasks, and forward momentum. Then I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. Very quickly, the metrics I had relied on stoppe

How to adjust daily routines to support your nervous system, energy, and changing body I am someone who loves routines. They help me meet goals. They lower my mental load. They give my days a sense of shape and predictability. Routines have been an essential support in my life, especially while living with rheumatoid arthritis. They help me conserve energy, stay consistent, and feel grounded when my body feels unpredictable. And still, routines can quietly stop serving us and

How to rebuild purpose, steadiness, and self-trust when your life and health have changed There is a particular kind of grief that comes with chronic illness. Not just grief for what hurts, or what changed, or what you can’t do on certain days. But grief for the sense of continuity. The feeling that your life used to make sense in a straightforward way, and now it requires constant renegotiation. You become someone who calculates everything. How much energy will this take? Wi

Why consistency, presence, and respecting capacity matter more than advice or fixing Most of us were taught how to support someone through something temporary. A breakup. A job loss. An injury. There is usually a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a clear before and after. There is a sense that if we show up well enough, long enough, things will eventually resolve. Chronic illness does not work like that. Chronic illness changes the rules of support. And most people do

How mindfulness can help reduce suffering and fear when you’re living with chronic pain or chronic illness In chronic illness, and honestly in life, pain is inevitable. I wish I had a softer way to say that. I don’t. Bodies hurt. They get inflamed. They malfunction. They surprise us in ways we didn’t plan for. No amount of positive thinking or “doing everything right” grants immunity from pain. But suffering is something else. Suffering is what gets layered on top of pain, an

Navigating uncertainty, identity shifts, and the in-between seasons of health As Allison J. Applebaum, PhD says in her book Stand By Me , “Uncertainty defines caregiving.” It also defines the chronic illness experience. Even when things are going well, there can be a quiet fear underneath it. The sense that your body is behaving right now, but you do not know how long that will last. Last spring, I experienced the most intense flare of Rheumatoid Arthritis inflammation and pa

Why managing autoimmune disease carries an invisible caregiving burden I just started reading Stand by Me by Allison J. Applebaum, PhD, and I already want to hand it to about a hundred people. The book is focused on caregiving, the kind most of us picture right away: caring for a parent, a partner, a child. Being the one who drives to appointments, manages medications, watches symptoms shift, holds the fear, keeps the wheels on. But a chapter in, I felt something in my chest

Navigating chronic illness, medication changes, and self-advocacy I didn’t start this year gently. I started it deep in the trenches. In pain that was loud and constant. In exhaustion that sleep didn’t touch. In confusion that made even simple decisions feel heavy. The year opened with a medication transition that should have been straightforward and absolutely was not. Insurance delays. Denials. A doctor’s office that moved slowly while my body unraveled quickly. Days tur

I had to learn that enjoying myself does not mean doing everything. Sometimes it means going for an hour instead of the whole evening. Sometimes it means sitting on the couch while others move around the kitchen. Sometimes it means saying no entirely and trusting that my relationships can hold that.

2017 was a year of upheaval. I moved halfway across the country. Started a new job in a field I had never worked in before. Met new people, explored new places, tried to build a life from scratch. And in the middle of all of that, my body began attacking itself. In the beginning of 2017 what I thought was run-of-the-mill knee pain from travel turned out to be the first signs of joint swelling from Rheumatoid Arthritis. Not a minor issue. Not something a little rest would fix.