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.