Persisting Pain

Dear Jameela Jamil, I sit here in tears as I write this. I know you probably won’t answer, but you are one of my biggest inspirations and I thought that if anyone could offer words of advice it would be you. Every time I see one of your tweets advocating body positivity or feminism or disability rights I like it and retweet and I think “I wish I could inspire people like she does”. I love what you are doing with iweigh. I love your acting but, even more so, I love your outlook on the world and your ability to inspire others. I am 19 years old. All of my life I have struggled with illnesses and disabilities that have left my body in a not-so-perfect condition. Don’t get me wrong, I am still grateful for all that I have – all of my limbs, a healthy weight, etc. I have struggled with body image for a decade already, but I thought that I had come to terms with my body. I even wrote a blog post at https://persistingpain.blogspot.com/2019/01/metamorphosis.html about my body pos...

The dating world is one that is difficult to navigate for anyone, not even taking into account disabilities. It was also a world that scared me and, because of that, I had never ventured into it. As I mentioned in my first blog posts – Recrudescence  and New Year, Same Journey – I spent a lot of 2018 trying to improve my life. As part of that I felt that it was finally time, at 19 years old, to enter the dating word. It’s not that I have ever felt incomplete without a relationship before, or that I think you need one in order to live a full life. It’s just that I want to start a family some day and, I’m sure everyone would agree, it can take years to find the person that I would want to do that with. I didn’t want to wait until I was nearly 30 and realise that it was too late. I fantasised about all of the ways that I would meet my soulmate – locking eyes across a bar, bumping into each other at university, being paired up for a group project, blah, blah, blah. But, in ...

It’s been three weeks now since I finally made the decision to hand in my notice of resignation to work. I loved my job, and loved the people I worked with; it was not an easy decision to leave. But the impact on my health was becoming too much and it wasn’t fair to my work to be constantly phoning in sick and leaving them without anyone to do the job. Making the decision to quit wasn’t as simple as it may be for others, because for me it wasn’t just “this job isn’t working for me, I will try something else”. For me, it meant “having a job isn’t working for me. I am not capable of juggling work and my health at the moment. I need to stop trying and making myself more ill”. For me, giving up my job was giving up my chance of success, my opportunity to socialise, my independence. It meant admitting that I had to rely on those around me to support me. And it meant admitting again that there was something – a basic life skill – that I couldn’t do because of my health. In my eyes, ...