It’s hard measuring up in this world when you have an invisible illness. Not all of us can compare ourselves in the same ways; there are things we’ve lost and things we may never have at all. Sometimes we seem like regular people and then end up bedridden. I struggled with this for years. Let’s just say that chronic illness and perfectionism don’t go together very well.
The world expects a lot from us. It expects us to always be in control of ourselves; our looks, our thoughts, our actions. We must always be striving to reach something greater, no matter what we have previously accomplished. Those standards are exhausting for anyone. Try having a chronic illness on top of that, and eventually, measuring yourself by these standards becomes impossible.
Eventually, I had enough of trying to live that way. Or, more accurately, my body had enough. I’m starting to learn that when you lose almost everything healthy people define themselves by, you learn what really matters. I’m not healthy, but I’m alive. I’ve lost friends, but I’ve found some of the best friends I could ever imagine in the chronic illness community. I may not impress or inspire anyone else, but I impress and inspire myself every single day. And that is enough for me.