@chronicillnessmemes / chronicillnessmemes.tumblr.com
Once my boyfriend told me: "You're not a burden. A burden is something you're forced to carry against your will. I freely choose to be a part of your life and that means you aren't a burden to me." I'm passing it on in case some of you need to be reminded of that.
You know who you are and I fucking love you okay. I would kill god with you because it means I get to help you.
how come there are so many posts these days that are like "You have to grow as a person and get over [trait that has to do with a disability/mental illness]. You see, it's important to function in life. I have Disability/Mental Illness, and i successfully Improved Myself, so don't say you can't do it."
Now typically, the whole point of a disability or mental illness is that it is something that has not responded to a simple individual effort to Get Better with no further strategy, information, or catalyst except simply Wanting To Get Better.
But let's say we are in an imaginary world where individual effort and willpower alone are enough to solve any problem, the necessity of tools, knowledge, or interpersonal support be damned. Who are you to imagine you can help someone's personal journey happen faster by making a snippy post? Have you never experienced being stubborn and resistant to advice because you were not ready to see that it was good advice? It is useless to tell someone who feels that their problem is unsolvable, that they need to simply solve their problem. And it is worse than useless to defend yourself from accusation of being callous by saying that you solved your problem by simply trying to solve it, so everyone should stop feeling that their problem is unsolvable.
Here is a vital wisdom: If you see that a person has a problem that looks easy, but the person has not been able to solve it, you should say to yourself, "Maybe the problem is actually hard, and it only looks easy to me because I have thought about their situation for 5 minutes, and they have thought about their situation for months or even years."
It's just not very likely that you are so incredibly much smarter and more disciplined than everyone else, that if you were placed into the life of a person who suffered for years from a problem, you would immediately see clearly how to solve their problem, be willing to work on it, and promptly begin improving it, whereas they were unwilling or unable to in all the years they had the problem.
its okay to be fat btw it doesn't make you ugly or a failure or less than anyone else and if anyone has made you feel bad about it thats a reflection of them and their fatphobia and anti blackness your body is just fine the way it is theres no morality attatched to fatness you just exist in that body and theres no issue with that and you dont even need to be healthy and fat either because health doesn't dictate if you're a bad person its okay to just be fat with no apologies or excuses
Say it with me, kids, "I do not deserve this pain. I am in chronic pain due to forces outside of my control. I should not have to earn pain relief. I am good. I do not deserve to be shamed for my pain. It is not my fault."
i don’t know what chronically-ill/disabled baddie needs to hear this, but doing things slowly, with a mobility aid, or with the help of a caregiver is still doing things. even if it took you an hour and five breaks to fold a load of laundry — you still did it! just because you can’t do things at the speed and ease of able-bodied people doesn’t mean you can’t do them. i just switched over the laundry and it took me 10 minutes and now i’m laying down in bed to recover, but i did it!!! and i’m proud of myself for even trying!
I’m proud of you for not giving up on yourself. I’m so glad you made it this far.
Irritates the hell out of me when people respond to a post or comment like, "everyone does this, it's not just [disorder/illness/neurotype], it's called being a person."
Yeah and everyone coughs once in a while but it doesn't mean someone with pneumonia doesn't cough?? It doesn't mean pneumonia doesn't cause coughing??
Everyone gets dizzy once in a while but it doesn't mean vertigo doesn't exist??
Just about every symptom or group-common trait is going to be experienced by people who don't belong to those groups or have that disorder. It's about the frequency and intensity with which that symptom or trait comes up.
google search how to cough up the ball of grief that's been stuck in your stomach since birth
alt text is not the place for fucking commentary, ESPECIALLY if you don't describe the image at all and ONLY include your commentary.
alt text is not a cheeky aside. it's not a private whisper to your friend.
alt text is an accessibility tool. fucking use it that way.
*me eating something that I know will make my tummy hurt* i don't really care if this makes my tummy hurt
*a few hours later when my tummy hurts* oh... the quencies ...
[ID: a tweet from The Chronic Notebook (@/chronicnotebook) that reads:
“With chronic illness, you normalize things that most people won’t ever feel. You normalize high levels of pain, not remembering how pain free feels, medical procedures and trauma, needing to rest after a shower. People see you surviving, but not all that you had to normalize to do so.”
end ID]
they should invent joints that dont hurt
The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.
The pit-of-your-stomach dread you feel when you finally remember what your forgot only to realize you've run out of time to do it... It would have been better if you had missed it entirely, but no, you remembered just in time to be paralyzed with fear over not being ready, like being woken up 30 minutes before a test you didn't study for.
anyway i love u "losers" and "boring" people in ur teens and 20s i love you anxious people i love you autists i love you disabled people i love you chronically ill people i love you immunocompromised people i love you people who can't go out and do stereotypical teen/20s activities and i love you people who don't want to. forever!!!
Folks have got to understand that they probably aren't messed up by some Secret Big Trauma that they just can't remember; but rather by a million tiny microtraumas that they do mostly remember but don't even register as traumatic because nobody actually understood that these things would cause trauma, much less stack on each other over the years.
Whether you're carrying one big rock or a big ol' bucket of sand, it's going to weigh on you just as much.
This is why psychologists have started taking more of an interest in CPTSD in the last 10-15 years. What most people know as PTSD is a response to a single, intensely traumatic event (or even a series of events). However, CPTSD (chronic post-traumatic stress disorder) is caused by living for years in a situation where your nervous system cannot catch a break. Even if nothing huge ever happened to you, you always had to be on guard for a thousand little things that could and did happen.
After years and years of this, your nervous system gets "stuck" in an activated threat response. It never really lets you rest, and if this started when you were a kid, you may not develop a lot of neural pathways that you should have, because your brain was too focused on keeping you safe to bother with little things like "genuine human connection" and "interpersonal attachment."
No lie, Complex PTSD/CPTSD is HUGE.
If you are disabled, if you are queer, if you are chronically ill, if you are the survivor of a toxic but not abusive relationship, if you grew up or lived under the threat of harm but no "actual" harm (or "very little" harm) was done, you may have CPTSD that isn't getting caught because CPTSD looks different from PTSD.
Im really tired of medical professionals not realising that their behaviour and their colleagues behaviour literally traumatises people.
