There's a specific kind of shock that comes when someone else sees your illness more clearly than you do.
After my colitis diagnosis, I kept working. I had a system. I was managing — or that's what I told myself.
When I finally asked my GP for sick leave, he gave me one month. I thought that felt about right. I told my workplace.
They gave me two.
They said I needed the rest. That it was clear I hadn't been okay.
I remember standing with that information and not knowing what to do with it. I had been so focused on performing fine — on showing up, on not letting anyone see — that I hadn't noticed I was no longer fine. The facade I thought I was maintaining had apparently been visible to everyone except me.
That's grief, too.
Not the big dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The realisation that the version of you who was managing, who was holding it together, who was maybe even a little proud of how well she was coping — she was already gone. And you didn't get to say goodbye, because you were too busy pretending she was still there.
A chronic illness diagnosis doesn't just change your body. It breaks a story.
Not the story you tell other people. The one you tell yourself about who you are. What you can do. What your days look like. Narrative therapy has a name for this: biographical disruption. The life you were building toward no longer makes sense. And where there's disruption, there's grief.
But grief for a life you're still living is strange. There's no funeral. No marker. People don't send flowers when you realise you can no longer work the hours you used to, or plan trips the way you did, or say yes to things without calculating the cost first.
The grief happens in small moments. In the pause before you answer "sure, I'll come." In the mental math before every commitment. In the distance between who you were and who you're still trying to be.
What I've noticed — in my own experience and with clients — is that this grief often gets mistaken for self-pity. Or catastrophising. Or not having the right mindset.
It isn't.
Grief is the appropriate response to a real loss. The loss of a self. Of a future you'd already started to imagine. Of a way of being in the world that felt like yours.
You don't need to reframe it into growth. You don't need to find the lesson in it right now, or maybe ever.
What you might need is permission to name it for what it is.
Loss.
The extra weeks my workplace gave me didn't feel like kindness at the time. They felt like confirmation of something I'd been refusing to admit.
I wasn't managing. I was keeping up appearances.
And underneath all that performance was someone grieving a version of herself she hadn't finished being yet.
What are you still performing fine about?