Your Symptoms Don't Define You

When I was so sick that I couldn’t stand up long enough to shower, the skin was coming off my face and bleeding for no apparent reason, I had heart palpitations and couldn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time, and the list goes on… I just remember feeling like a complete waste of space as a human.

My self-esteem was in the toilet and I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I kept feeling like if I could just figure out why then I could fix it. Part of me wondered if I was being punished for some reason or I had done some thing to cause this.

Going from doctor to doctor and not getting any answers and being treated like I was making it up in my head was demoralizing. I remember wondering if maybe I was crazy or something was wrong with me mentally since they couldn’t find anything.

My sense of self was completely broken and I didn’t know what to do. Staying hopeful and keeping positive felt like an impossibility.
I had not realized that so much of my identity was tied up in what I was doing with my life and who my friends were and how everything outside of me was defining me.

I’m weirdly grateful that I went through that horrible ten-year period of being so sick that I never thought I would get my health back because Through that experience I found myself.

I spent so many years feeling like my symptoms defined who I was. I felt useless and unimportant and devalued because of my symptoms. There were so many things I could not do and I started to lose friends because I appeared flaky and unreliable and quite frankly people did not really believe I was sick because I could not get a diagnosis.

It takes a lot of core and inner strength to keep throwing spaghetti at the ceiling and see what sticks and not give up until you get answers. No matter what you are going through there are answers. No matter how long it feels like it’s taking there are answers so don’t give up.

Remember your symptoms don’t define you. You define you.

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