Showing Up with Chronic Illness
This dealt hand of chronic illness is akin to being drafted into a war nobody else can see and then being told to keep your voice down about it. There’s no trophy for “Most Stoic Sufferer.” No parade for getting out of bed when your spine feels like it is staging a protest. The brutal truth is this. Pain does not care about your plans, your productivity hacks, or your five year vision board. The illness is apathetic to it all, which is why I can appreciate Camus as I do. The illness will interrupt your ambition mid sentence, while you struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self, holding onto the dream of who you were before the illusions of life started to shatter around you. And that is where the real work starts. Chronic pain and illness forces a question most people spend their lives avoiding. What actually matters when you cannot rely on your body to cooperate? Most don’t have to face this question as their health illusion has yet to shatter, but if you are reading this, you are already part of the tribe seeking a life after the shattered illusions. You cannot control the flare, but you can control whether you build your identity around resentment or around values. Values are steady in all kinds of weather, where the thoughts and feelings can be whipped around like a flag in a storm. You’ll notice the values are the solid unflinching pole in the storm holding the flag of thoughts and feelings. You cannot eliminate the discomfort, despite what they try to sell you online, but you can decide whether you will still show up, imperfect and slower, maybe operating at half capacity, for the people and values you care about. And no, I don’t have a readymade list of values to believe in, but the list resides inside of you and our work in to find out what you believe constitutes a meaningful existence. Pain shrinks your world only if you let it define the borders and expanding the story of who you are is the agenda I am working with to help improve the quality of your life. Otherwise, it becomes a ruthless editor that cuts out the trivial, spotlights the essential, and dares you to build a life that is meaningful not in spite of the pain, but alongside it. I bear no cures, no potions or lotions, to ameliorate what you may suffer from, but suffering less is possible, managing the suffering is reasonable and that’s exactly where I can be of service.
Dr. Jeffrey Bone