You were free. Free to be whoever you wanted, within limits nobody had explained to you yet, and free to make some genuinely questionable calls along the way.

We know they mean well. We know the questions come from love, and the suggestions come from wanting to help, and the silence sometimes comes from not knowing what to say. We get it. This is hard to understand from the outside because from the outside, we often look completely fine.

Because depression doesn't always look like not getting out of bed. Sometimes it looks like the funniest person in the room.

Here is something nobody tells the people on the other side of chronic illness: this is hard for you too, and you're allowed to say so.

Because the pit you fall into after a diagnosis is real… and it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.

I'd spent the day being careful. Resting, eating well, not overdoing it. The whole strategic pre-event routine that I've slowly built up and that my younger self would have absolutely mocked me for.

You wake up and you know immediately. Before you’ve looked at your phone or thought about the day ahead, your body has already filed its report.

Chronic illness has a way of quietly shrinking your world if you're not careful, and I'd been watching mine get a little smaller.

I’m almost a year into being self-employed. And some days I want to burn the whole thing down, not because I don’t love it, I do, genuinely, deeply, but because being a perfectionist with a chronic illness is its own specific kind of exhausting.