Chronic illness is weird in that if a healthy person got ill for a week with the symptoms I deal with every single day, they’d likely rest and do the bare minimum for that week. But because my symptoms are forever I’m meant to live life as normal no matter how dreadful I feel.

Sometimes this leads to this weird situation where I have to explain my condition repeatedly to the same people who seem to not understand why sometimes I can’t do everything. I have to be like “erm remember that chronic illness thing? It’s..still chronic. I’m doing my best.”

“You’re behind on XYZ”. “You haven’t done XYZ this week?” “Wow your laundry pile is huge.” Etc etc. It feels like a constant.. coming out, almost. And I don’t want to feel like I’m finding an excuse. But it’s my reality. One that those around me seem to weirdly just forget?!

So it becomes awkward because I don’t want to constantly be pointing out something that people already know. But because it’s long term people really do seem to expect it to not impact my life in a way they’d understand it doing so if it were a fleeting illness-which is absurd.