Anxiety, insomnia, fibromyalgia, depression, chronic pain, arthritis and reproduction issues. These are just a few of the invisible illnesses that people around the world suffer. These illnesses can be debilitating or they can just flat our ruin your day/plans that you had because you are not feeling well. Living with an invisible illness is hard. No one sees you struggling to get out of bed in the morning. No one sees how much pain medication you have to take daily just to make it tolerable. No one sees how much you struggle daily to make sure others don't see you struggle. You may look good, healthy, and well put together on the outside but no one can see how much you are hurting. They don't see how much you wish, hope, and pray that someday you begin to feel normal again.
Living with an invisible disease is like playing the lottery. Every day when you wake up, you really don't know what the day will bring with it. Pain, frustration, sadness, feelings of inadequacy, insomnia, tiredness, or just downright feeling normal for once. Being diagnosed with an invisible illness is like playing the lottery where winning and not winning equally suck. This medication may work, this one may not. This medication might work but it will also do this to you. This medication might cure you but it also gives you this illness/disease. Your life begins to feel like a guessing game. It sometimes just seems to be one thing after the other — the vicious never ending cycle of illness.
Recently, you could say that I contracted an invisible illness to say the least. When looking at me, you could never tell what happened or that a couple weeks ago I was in a much different place than I am today. I try to live my life by the motto that we don't see the daily battles that everyone is going through. We don't know a stranger's past and we don't know why they do the things that they do. We only know what people allow us to know. So before you tell someone with pain that it "isn't that bad," please stop and think. You don't know their pain. You don't know their past. Quite frankly, you don't know anything. Everyone's pain tolerance is different, and everyone's perception and fear of pain are different as well.
It's not uncommon for people to see me in my hometown, do a double take and then tell me how good I look since my surgery. Some question what my plans are with school and why I decided the things that I did. But they don't know my pain. They don't know me, they just know what I decide to tell them.
