How I’m Working With My Chronic Illness Instead of Against It

It’s involuntarily become my favorite coworker.

Photo by on

A smidge of background

I’ve had endometriosis for 28 years, and now I also have long COVID, fibromyalgia, POTS, ME/CFS, and Chronic Pain Syndrome.

My chronic illness has spent about three years mutating into its current state. I like equating it to college students trying to figure out what they want to do in life.

But instead of dabbling in art history and anthropology before settling on engineering, my illness was deliberating exactly how many acronyms it wanted to collect before settling into its final form.

And now that it's written its thesis and graduated, it’s chosen a tenured position as a pain in my ass (sometimes literally).

Despite the myriad of medications that are intended to lessen my symptoms, some of them are life-altering. There’s only so much that pharmaceuticals can do for a .

So I’ve stopped treating the symptoms and started working with them.

Quick detour into my identity reformation

I went to college around Y2K for web design and development, as well as professional writing. I figured…