A Dish Served Absurd

Living with chronic illness means waking up every day inside a reality that makes absolutely no sense. Your body becomes the unreliable narrator of your life. One day you can grocery shop, answer emails, pretend to be a functioning adult. The next day your nervous system acts like it’s been possessed by a raccoon on meth. And the absurd part isn’t just the symptoms, it’s realizing the world keeps moving like none of this is happening. People still talk about productivity hacks while you’re trying to negotiate peace treaties with your own spine at 3 a.m. But maybe that’s the hidden truth chronic illness drags you toward, life was never guaranteed to be fair, coherent, or meaningful in the first place. We just prefer the illusion that it is. The challenge becomes learning how to build a life anyway. Not because suffering magically transforms into inspiration, but because refusing to participate in your own existence is its own kind of surrender. So you laugh at the absurdity when you can. You grieve when you need to. You stop waiting to become the person you were before. And somewhere in that wreckage, you begin constructing a version of meaning that doesn’t depend on being healthy to deserve a life.

Dr. Jeffrey Bone