Iconic, Considering

A body that keeps changing the rules. A life I’m still determined to live.

If you will indulge me, I want to stray into the very annoying motivational speak for a moment. I usually avoid it at all costs but I do have one phrase that I like to repeat when things are feeling especially hopeless. Here goes:

Your success rate for surviving tough days so far is 100%.

That’s it, that’s the message. Let that sink in for a sec.

If you live with chronic illness, those “tough days” are not the occasional blip, they are probably the norm. They are woven into the fabric of your very being. There have been flares that frightened you. Mornings where getting upright felt, or actually was, impossible. Evenings where the exhaustion felt so complete it bordered on grief. There have been moments where you have quietly wondered how sustainable any of this is, how long you can keep adjusting your life around a body that does not offer consistency in return.

And still.

One hundred percent.

I am not saying this in a glittery, frankly irritating, “everything happens for a reason” way. I mean it in the most grounded, totally exhausted, factual way possible. You have got through every flare you have ever had and you are still here. You have had every wobble, every “I can’t keep doing this” moment, and you are reading this right now.

You total legend.

There are days when living like this feels relentless. It is repetitive and often lonely. Steady pressure builds and builds. The kind that requires constant micro-adjustments. You wake up and assess. You negotiate. You factor pain and energy and consequence into decisions that used to be automatic.

There are mornings when the exhaustion feels personal, as though your body has taken something from you overnight. Your skin hurts, your thoughts are thick, your energy has evaporated before the day has begun, and still there are children who need feeding, work that requires focus, conversations that cannot be postponed indefinitely.

You feel the weight of that. Of course you do.

That mental arithmetic runs constantly, and most people will never see it. They will see the version of you that shows up. They see you functioning. They see you working, parenting, socialising, contributing. They do not see the background calculations or the cost of a “normal” day.

You see it. And you keep going anyway.

I don’t want to dress that up as bravery and sound like every other toxic positivity peddler out there. It’s not that noble. Sometimes it is just sheer bloody-mindedness. Sometimes it is obligation - after all, it is frowned upon to not feed your children regularly. Sometimes it is love for the people who rely on you because, yes, we do actually want to feed them regularly. Sometimes it is the simple refusal to let chronic illness swallow the whole of your identity.

Whatever the driver, the outcome is the same. You are still showing up in your own life.

There is anger in this life. Let’s be honest about that. Sometimes a steady, private resentment at how much thought everything requires. Sometimes raging, chaotic anger that spills out. Mate, you are up against it and we can’t be stoic and heroic all the bloody time. Let rip if you need to. If I had the energy and every fibre of my being didn’t hurt, I would absolutely love to fuck shit up in one of those rage rooms. Have a proper Eastenders moment and smash a place up - a place I don’t have to clean up, obviously. But, as I can’t do that, being a moody Margaret once in a while is the least I deserve!

There is some grief that creeps in sometimes too. That grief is real. It doesn’t make you ungrateful because you feel it. It also definitely does not cancel out the love you feel for your people or the ambition you still have. It just exists alongside them, another layer to hold. Another burden to carry - or smash onto the ground - whatever works for you, sis.

And still, you don’t quit.

You continue to build beautiful things inside constraints that would flatten a lot of people. You keep loving fiercely even when you are depleted. You keep caring about your work, your family, your future, even when your body is waving the white flag and wants to lie down and figurately, sometimes literally, die. You might make it look easy but you are doing it while fully aware of how hard it is.

One hundred percent.

There have been moments, I’m sure, where you genuinely wondered if you could keep absorbing this. Where the exhaustion or the pain or the uncertainty felt like too much. Where you thought, I don’t know how sustainable this is. I am sure because I feel it too.

And yet, you rested. You adjusted expectations. You asked for help or you gritted your teeth or you lowered the bar to ankle height and stepped over it anyway.

You kept living.

There is something plain extraordinary about that, even if it does not feel extraordinary from inside a body that seems to have a blood curse on you. To live inside ongoing struggle and still choose visibility over withdrawal, care over bitterness, ambition over resignation. To keep negotiating instead of surrendering.

Iconic, considering.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not noble. But, in conditions that are objectively crappy, you have chosen not to disappear.

That deserves more credit than you probably give yourself.

And if no one else says it, I will.

Go you.