Pain, Unfiltered

Caption:

“I don’t care what people think.”

Sounds good.
Feels powerful.
And some days, I absolutely mean it.

But chronic illness will make you prove that statement over and over again.

When people think you’re lazy because you rested.
When they question why you canceled.
When they saw you out yesterday, so they don’t understand why you can’t move today.
When you stop explaining yourself and somebody decides to write their own explanation.

That’s when “I don’t care what people think” gets hard.

Because I’m human. Of course sometimes it hurts to be misunderstood.

But I’m learning something:

Protecting my body has to matter more than protecting somebody else’s opinion of me.

They don’t have to understand my limits.

I have to live with what happens when I ignore them. 💜

Hashtags:

For years, I called them personality flaws.

Lazy.
Moody.
Unreliable.
Dramatic.
Antisocial.
Weak.

I judged myself by what I couldn’t do and never stopped to ask why it had become so hard to do it.

Then chronic illness gave me language for things I had spent years turning into character flaws.

Exhaustion wasn’t laziness.
Overstimulation wasn’t attitude.
Canceled plans weren’t a lack of love.
Needing rest wasn’t weakness.

Sometimes the hardest person to give grace to is the person you were before you understood what your body was going through. 💜

I wasn’t failing at being a person.
I was trying to live in a body I didn’t understand yet.

Hashtags:

I call fibromyalgia The Beast for a reason.

Sometimes it roars. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it lets me almost forget it’s there.

But it is ever lurking. Ever present.

It has changed my plans, my body, my limits, and what ordinary things cost me. But after all these years, there’s one thing it still hasn’t managed to do:

Get rid of me.

You live with me, Beast.
I don’t live for you. 💜

Hashtags:

Sometimes the person behind the chronic illness page has to disappear for a minute… because she’s dealing with THE CHRONIC ILLNESS. 💜

I didn’t stop caring. I didn’t lose interest. I didn’t give up. I lost capacity.

And that’s one of the hardest parts of chronic illness: while your body forces you to rest, life keeps moving. The laundry waits. The messages pile up. The responsibilities are still there. Then the moment you get a little energy back, you try to catch up on EVERYTHING… and before you know it, you’ve spent every spoon you just got back. 🥄

Flare → forced rest → life piles up → feel a little better → try to catch up → overdo it → flare again.

That cycle is REAL.

I’m learning that I wasn’t resting so I could do more. I was resting because my body needed recovery. And breaking the cycle sometimes means not spending every spoon the moment I get it back.

So after almost two weeks away, I’m not starting over.

I’m starting from where my body left me. 💜

Sometimes showing up for yourself means you can’t show up everywhere else.

And that’s okay.

💜 Pain, Unfiltered.

Fibromyalgia can become a cycle. 💜

Mental and emotional overload can intensify physical symptoms. Stress, anxiety, grief, anger, overwhelm, and emotional exhaustion can leave the body feeling the weight of what the mind has been carrying.

But it works the other way too.

Constant pain, crushing fatigue, poor sleep, brain fog, and unpredictable symptoms can take a toll on your mental and emotional well-being.

And that’s where the cycle can begin:

Mental/emotional overload → symptoms intensify → more pain, fatigue & poor sleep → more mental/emotional strain → symptoms become harder to manage → and the cycle continues.

Sometimes stress triggers the flare.
Sometimes the flare creates the stress.
Sometimes you can’t even tell which came first.

That doesn’t make either one less real.

Your fibromyalgia flare isn’t always triggered by what you DID.

Sometimes it’s triggered by what you’ve been CARRYING.

And sometimes… the thing you’re carrying IS the fibromyalgia. 💜