When Illness Reveals the Truth You Never Planned to See

 

by Rebecca Bloom

I did not expect illness to teach me anything. I thought it would only take. Take my energy. Take my plans. Take the version of myself I had relied on for so long. And in many ways it did. But illness also revealed something I never would have seen while moving fast. It uncovered the life I had been living on borrowed strength.

When rheumatoid arthritis entered my life, everything slowed. Not gently. Not gradually. It was a sudden, unavoidable stop. My pain became louder than my habits. My fatigue became stronger than my willpower. My body refused to continue the performance I had spent years perfecting.

At first I was angry. I grieved the person I thought I was. The busy one. The capable one. The dependable one who never complained and never stopped. Illness took that identity apart piece by piece.

But in the quiet that followed, another truth appeared. I began to see the life underneath the speed. The loneliness I covered with productivity. The sadness I hid behind strength. The unmet needs buried beneath years of pleasing people who never really saw me. The exhaustion that was never physical, but emotional.

Illness did not create those truths. It simply revealed them. It showed me the parts of myself that had been waiting for me. The child who learned to earn love. The teenager who believed her value came from being useful. The adult who confused exhaustion with achievement.

Sometimes I think my body broke because my life was breaking. Not on the outside. But on the inside where no one could see. And slowing down was the only way I could hear what had been unspoken for years.

Illness has taken things from me. That is true. But it has also shown me who I am without performance. Who I am without the mask. Who I am when I finally stop long enough to feel.

It is uncomfortable. It is unplanned. It is heavy. But it is real. And for the first time, I am learning to live inside a truth that does not hide itself in busyness.

Rebecca Bloom