Most chronic illness stories have a clean before and after. There was the healthy version, and then there was the diagnosis.
Mine doesn't work like that.
I grew up with fibromyalgia. Except when you are a kid, you don't call it that. You just feel weird. You run out of energy before everyone else. You hurt in places no one else seems to hurt. It wore me out, sure - but it wasn't DANGEROUS. So I wasn't afraid of it.
I built a story that said: okay, I live in pain. That is just how it is.
And honestly? I got good at it. I figured out what I needed, I asked for adjustments at work, and that actually became how I moved up. I built a whole system around my pain that worked with me. I wasn't ashamed to be me or have a crash at work. They even got used to it hehe.
Then I turned twenty-three and got diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. And the system broke.
UC is a different kind of problem. The flares are bad and painful and , if you ignore them long enough they can actually become dangerous. So all the tools I had built around fibro (the pushing through the pain, the negotiating) stopped applying. You can't push through a UC flare. You just can't.
Rewriting the story here isn't about "accepting your new normal". It's about honestly looking at your body today and asking: what does staying steady actually require right now? Not last year. Not before UC. Now.
The old script said: manage the pain, adapt, keep climbing.
The new script is still unwritten (feeling a lot like in the song). And that part is messy and ongoing but i'm still excited to be showing up daily to blog about it :)