MOURNING YOUR LIFE BEFORE CHRONIC ILLNESSES.

I guess no one really talks about how you will mourn the life you had before chronic illnesses took over. 

It’s been over four years now since I became chronically ill. I’ve already mentioned how chronic illnesses change the relationships you have with people in your life and how people will leave your life but not really how these life changes make you go through a different kind of loss. We mourn the life we had before chronic illnesses took over, before they became more difficult to manage and just majorly out of our control.

You start missing simple things. You miss being able to enjoy a day out without having to stop because of the pain or needing to leave early because of the exhaustion and nausea. You miss being able to go into town without having to know where the nearest toilets are at each location in case of an emergency. You miss not having to have a walking stick on you at all times in case you take a sudden turn for the worse and need support to help you make it back home. You miss the relationships you had before your health changed. You miss the fact you could manage without medications and never going to your Dr but that turns into a once a month ordeal.

There’s a lot of things you end up missing and thinking about. You’re now more scared of intimate relationships and letting people get close because you don’t want to add more stress into their lives when you’re in a flare. You start questioning whether you’re enough for anyone and to be enough to be part of their lives. It all changes and you’re too scared to acknowledge the fact that you have changed, your life has changed and you have to adapt to these changes. 

Four years. Four years of being unwell and it had taken about three and a half years to acknowledge that I wasn’t going to be going back to the person I used to be. Acknowledging this was probably the biggest step to take in regards to my health and wellbeing and it wasn’t easy - it’s still not easy. Sometimes you need to go through a lot of shit to get to this point in your life to realise and acknowledge this. That’s okay. There’s times when shit gets rough, it gets dark and you don’t feel like you’re going to get past that point but you will. It’s different for everyone. Some people will probably acknowledge that they won’t be the same person in a shorter amount of time and some people will take longer. It’s a strange loss you’ll experience. I don’t think we ever experience ourselves changing as a loss until it’s something out of our control that forces change.