I have a chronic illness, which ironically I found more manageable before I started getting treatment for it. I'd been coping with it passably for years until I started work, when things started to get worse for me, as it had a knock-on effect on my physical health. Well, I say "coping" but what I was actually doing was a remarkably good job of ignoring it and pretending to be what I thought of as "normal" at the time.
Ultimately I had to leave my job and very narrowly avoided being sectioned because of it...now I'm in therapy limbo, trying to pick up the pieces. It's a difficult thing to live with, although I think the trick is to just take one day at a time...or one hour, or one minute, depending on how bad it gets at any given moment.
This is especially true of anxiety. I'm prone to panic attacks as well, and I have to contract my thinking significantly to gain some semblance of control over myself. The future is important, and it helps to have goals, but I've been working in six month stages with my care team; I set long-term goals and don't worry about meeting them week by week, but try and do a little day by day. It's exhausting sometimes, but I think everyone has good and bad days. I find having short-term targets makes the anxiety worse, as I worry I won't meet them, which prompts panic, which means I don't meet them...then I worry about the repurcussions. It's really easy to get trapped in negative cyclical thinking like that.
I expect if I were to see my psychologist again she'd assign me all sorts of fun labels, as more than once my doctors have wanted to put me on medicine for depression and anxiety, but if I've been shown anything this past year and a half it's that I'm happier not knowing the specifics. I didn't even know I had a chronic illness until I was told I did; I thought it was something else entirely.
I think people with chronic illnesses do often feel alone, as so much time and effort is spent concealing it...at least, in my experience this is often the case, and I've spoken to a couple of other people who were much the same. Even now I can't come straight out and name what I've got, and I spend a lot of time dodging questions and being as vague as possible. I spent the better part of my teenage years covering my tracks to make sure nobody noticed, and it was exhausting. I had friends, but we weren't close, and whilst a part of that is due to my natural reticence, I think that part of me has come from this as much as it has anything else. These things change you, and it's difficult to open up to people for various reasons - fear, shame, a certainty the other person won't understand/will look at you differently, etc. Hopefully I'm not just spouting nonsense here and making some sort of sense.
Knowing that I'll never get rid of it entirely has drained me a lot of my desire to do...anything, to be honest. I know that's melodramatic, but sometimes it's difficult to muster up the energy to do anything with my time, when I'm not allowed to do anything at the moment until my health is in a better position in general. I have ambitions aplenty and I long to get back into full-time employment, but there's this thing standing in my way and, whilst I believe things will get better eventually, I wonder what sort of effect it's going to have on my life afterwards. I can't imagine life any other way than how I've always lived, and knowing I'll always have this thing...well, it's conflicting, and hard to stay even slightly positive.
It's a crippling thing to live with, and I sympathize with anyone who has trouble coping with life because of these things sometimes as well. I wouldn't presume to empathize, as it varies from person to person, but I can understand the general feelings behind it. I guess it's supposed to get worse before it gets better, or at least this is what I'm told.
