The Chronic Grief of Chronic Illness

Sometimes healing isn’t about getting better; it’s about making room for life alongside it

Having chronic and mental illness isn’t for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, I am faint of heart. Mine is pieced together after having had it repeatedly smashed to the ground by people I trusted explicitly over the last twenty years. Mine didn’t turn to stone or black. Mine became softer, more squishy and even easier to stab into and draw blood from.

At the same time, I did build a wall around me. I wouldn’t let anyone in. Not truly. The past decade I made hard work of taking down the circular wall around me, brick by brick, through a lot of self-help and therapy.

And friends who finally accepted me. Cancellations, warts and all. It restored my heart. It’s still squishy, still infused with social en medical trauma, but it has healed over a little and most of the wounds have become scars.

Or so I thought.

Over the past few months I have once again had to dig deep into my own strength to not be pulled under into the vast darkness through multiple failed migraine treatments, endless flaring diseases and sinking mental health.

I didn’t always succeed in keeping my head above water.

What you see here is a woman recovering from two days of big, fat tears making her eyes smaller and smaller, and the bags as well as the migraine lots bigger. Tears over everything that follows from having ME/CFS, ibs, chronic migraines, Graves’ disease, severe anxiety disorder and diabetes, with a fun icing on the cake called adhd and hsp.

It means:

•symptoms pulling your brain away from reality

•anxiety telling you lies that feel so real all you can do is sit on the sofa very, very still

•no escape from the symptoms

•financial struggles and worries

•friends safely far away, so you don’t have to cancel on them (except when you meet via Zoom or FaceTime… so you stop scheduling that too)

•no job to fulfil you, colleagues to have a cup of tea with, or have something of value to do for 8 hours a day

•thoughts and fears about your present, near future, far away future, and if the planet will remember if you were ever here at all.

And more.

These big fat tears were necessary to let some of this ongoing and unending pain out.

All the above is forever, every day, without any breaks. And sometimes the build up requires a valve to be opened up for release of this emotional pain. I often release too late. Way too late.

But now I have, I know there is room again for something fresh to enter.

Like new stories. My own stories. And stories to read. And the ones I get to help being written into existence. I hope I get to do more of that now.

And then perhaps the planet will remember I was here, when in a hundred plus years my body finally does give in after a hundred and twenty years refusing to give up: by leaving behind stories that make us dream, laugh, think, escape, wonder and cry.

But for now, I’ve dried my tears, and I am here to give you the biggest, tightest solidarity hug I have in me if any of this resonates with you.

Our daily life isn’t an easy one, but it is still such a valuable one.

Sandra Postma

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