MANAGING INVISIBLE ILLNESS LOOKS LIKE:

accomplishing things you couldn’t have imagined when you were diagnosed, visiting your favorite city for the first time on your 16th birthday despite how many times you need to sit down, your systolic reaching 100 for the first time in years, carrying on generations of spider plants, spending a day at the park with your best friend, going back home and remembering, going to camp and not being able to keep up with your cousins but reveling in the sunset anyway, returning to your favorite city and seeing one of your favorite bands with your favorite people, flying by yourself to make amends, creating a safe space for your creativity, flying by yourself again because everyone needs to break sometimes, being brave.

(a companion to: x)

INVISIBLE ILLNESS LOOKS LIKE:

hours spent in doctor’s offices, diagnostic tests, medications and their side effects clogging your cupboards, prescription strength compression stockings, ugly impressions after days in those stockings, more medications and side effects, record high blood pressure numbers, early morning hot chocolates before more appointments, pricks in the arm every few weeks because of more side effects of more medications, ending up in the hospital with infections that should have been minor.

INVISIBLE ILLNESS IS:

hours with doctors that don’t believe your reality and physical therapists that believe in simply you, trying every drug on the market, trying every method suggested, working your ass off to teach your body how to do things able bodied people don’t even think twice of, cheering for numbers that should be worrying, ‘you don’t look sick’, biting your tongue, being brave.

Sometimes you have to go through tough times to get to something beautiful

Love this bracelet