Truth

(The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo, 1939)

Illness is hard

It is messy

It beats you down

It makes you want to tear out your hair

and cry into your cornflakes.

It pulls you apart

and discards the parts without care.

Illness doesn't always get better

and it sometimes gets worse.

It isn't clear

or clean

 or cute.

Illness is pain

and vomit and crapping yourself until nothing is left.

Illness is lying on the floor of the toilet

confused and crying, and sore.

It's bodily fluids, selected and tested

and escaping at will.

It's tubes and infections.
It's being stripped bear and examined.

It's catheters and cannulas.

Pacemakers and pumps.

The blinking and beeping of machines

and the tortuously slow drip of the IV into the reservoir.

It's pills and potions and poisons.
It's silence and looks, and the hedging of bets.

Illness isn't a neat package of symptoms

diagnosis,

treatment,

and cure.

It's acknowledging a lack of knowledge

a lack of options

a lack of prognoses.

A hidden path

which may never get clearer.

Illness challenges who you are

It destroys and remakes, over

and over and over again.

Illness lets you believe you've found your even keel

Only to throw a cyclone in your path once more.

It's belief

and disbelief.

Both our own and of others.

Hope and disappointment

a tangle of knots and frayed parts.

Systems, people, bodies 

betrayed and saved in a mire of ambiguity.

Illness isn't heroic or brave or epiphanies and illumination

Illness isn't good or bad

it just is.

But people

people are different.

People are scared and lost and defeated

and strong and resilient and hopeful

all at the same time.

Contradictory and confusing.

They cry and they weep.

They rage and they bellow

They laugh and they mock
They are fallible and imperfect

And people keep going time after time

after time

Sometimes they are brave

Sometimes there is no other choice

And sometimes it is the face they show when inside they are crumbling.

People hold it together

barely

and fully

and somewhere in between.

There is no one way.

No right way.

Illness is unique and personal

and messy and complicated

Just like the people it inhabits

Illness simply is

But people are dynamic, contradictory and splendiferous.

Flawed, imperfect, and resilient

We rise again and again.

We remould our broken pieces.

We deal with shadows and murky depths

And keep paddling

Long after our strength fails.

Because the protagonist in our story isn't illness.

It's us.

Michelle

Remember to head on over here to donate to my Clicking My Heels For Dysautonomia, raising money for the Greg Page Fund for Orthostatic Intolerance and Dysautonomia research, at The Baker IDI. Thanks to the generosity of many we've already raised over $2,000, keep donating and hopefully we can reach $10,000.