Posts tagged “Chronic Illness”

A life of only suffering isn’t

Endurance is possible, but endurance on its own does not equal a full, contributing life. Our purpose in life is not, cannot be, simply to suffer. From Carlyn Zwarenstein’s Opium Eater: The New Confessions.

Legitimate illness

What makes something a disease? And why would some people with migraine fight to have migraine recognized as a disease? Locating migraine in the brain is believed to alleviate personal responsibility, a dynamic that advocates think is important after decades of medical practitioners telling patients that their personalities caused their pain. Identifying migraine as genetic […]

How the expectation of relief changes pain

Pain is a complex experience …I enjoy the waiting. Once I have decided that today is going to be a tramadol day, and I’ve given myself a deadline before which I absolutely will not cave in and take it, my experience of pain is transformed. Rather than grinding and hopeless, it feels charged, electric. The […]

Migraine: a journal sample

May 19, 2018 I want to get up every day and feel okay or even well. To have energy and some expectation of getting things done. I don’t want to be disabled. I feel like life is passing me by, like I don’t do anything, like my life doesn’t matter. I say that I know […]

Ill living

Once, when I was much much younger, I told someone I trusted that every day I chose to live. I thought this person might understand something of what it was to live with chronic migraine. But they ordered a wellness check and our interactions turned achingly distant and coldly professional. I am reading the October […]

Why I can’t write a good personal essay | Tenure, She Wrote

I wrote about how my understanding of disability has shifted from internal to external and how that’s affected my ability to get support. A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good […]