On Illness

Our letter writer gets a bit “emosh”

November 22, 2023 

Dear Smythe,

It’s familiar, this feeling. But not the easy acquaintance of being in the company of an old friend with a couple of pints in front of us. Nor is it like the ache of my muscles after a long run, painful, but refreshing. No, it’s a different remembrance, this one. It feels like a fever burning, long days under the covers, gasping for breath and never quite catching enough. Only I get up to look in the mirror and I appear perfectly fine. 

I was twenty-one when I first got sick. I was twenty-four when I got a diagnosis. My first one. But later there were others. Long COVID the most recent addition. I’ve spent the last eight years - my adult life - managing my health, my internal state ranging on a daily basis from “wishing for immediate death” to, if I’m lucky, “I can go a few hours without thinking about it.” I forgot, a few years ago, what it is like to just feel normal. 

I don’t resent this, because that wouldn’t help anything. I spent my early twenties hoping things would be different, and all I have to show for it are wasted years and broken friendships, relationships. And a lot of unhappiness. A friend told me back then, “Everyone has a cross to bear. This is yours.” It turns out his stoicism has allowed me to survive and eventually access happiness. 

Moving to Ireland saved me. It was a gift: a year to rest, recover, focus on my writing (my passion). I did get better. A lot better. I still had flare-ups, bad weeks, one bad month, but for the first time in years, I felt like myself again. Hope. I gained that too. That I wasn’t destined for a life of living in pain. I allowed myself to dream of all the things I really wanted. I’d travel the world and write about it. I’d live in Paris. I’d scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef. I would die old after a life well-lived. Maybe I’d even find love.

But it’s back again. Long days now that I’m back at work, up at 6 AM, not back home until 7 at night, spending half a work-day just on my commute. It’s already taking a toll. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I’m aware of is how difficult it feels to breathe. I’m in my new home, this beautiful green island, but this is an old feeling. I don’t like it. In fact, I hate it. I worry that it will last. I worry it will get worse. After all, it isn’t new.

“You look pale, Marguerite. You don’t seem like yourself,” my friend said to me over the weekend. I wondered if this is my real self. That fear creeped back in, the one I lived with before I moved here, that I would spend my life trapped in this miserable body, that my dreams would be left untouched because I would just be too sick. Now that I’ve tasted possibility, it feels all the more bitter that I might let it go.

It’s difficult, chronic illness. Not only because of how absolutely shit I feel all the time (pardon my French, I know you don’t care). But because everyone expects you to be fine. I’m young, after all. Why wouldn’t I be healthy? I worry, too, how this will impact my relationships here. My new friends. My new boyfriend. Will things change when I’m not my best self? I’m afraid of losing everything. You knew me before I moved here, Smythe. I know I wasn’t always so easy to be around. It wasn’t easy being in myself. Pain twists you and changes you and turns you into someone else. Eight years has been a long time living in her.

I would like to end this letter on a promising note. I want to believe in happy endings. Right now, I don’t feel hopeful. But I’ll write the ending all the same. I moved here, and I got better. I’ll get better again. I’ll find time to rest. I’ll get well, well enough to chase my dreams. I won’t be alone in this again. Hope. I’m holding on. So tightly…do you feel my hands tremble?

Love,

Marguerite