Name: 30 Lessons about life with a chronic illness... [CC]
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T18:37:49.000Z
Duration: 11 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Since I have now been on this planet for 30 years,

and lived with a debilitating chronic illness for most of them,

- I thought I should tell you the 30 key life lessons I have learnt in my journey.

Like every piece of advice on my channel, I don’t think that these all necessarily

apply purely to people with chronic illnesses.

I hope you can take at least one thing from this list

no matter what you’re going through or the adversity you have overcome.

Let me know in the comments below which you most relate to most and any you think I’ve missed.

My connection to the world outside my house...

If I lived 100 years ago I would just have to spend my days writing

copious letters to random addresses I had found in the directory.

And they would not subscribe to my letters, leave comments, click the ‘like’ button OR share it with their friends...

So many weird medical articles that can only make you feel worse!

Once you have your diagnosis, don’t spend the next decade googling it at random intervals,

or else you’ll just be reminding yourself that it’s progressive and you’re eventually going downhill...

good times(!) Also, you can pretty much convince yourself you have anything

28. You will become an excellent liar and faker.

27. There is no such thing as a schedule.

You will be late, you will cancel last minute,

you will feel awful some evenings, you will feel amazing some evenings,

you will sleep in, or you will get up five hours too early and not be able to get to sleep again.

26. You’ll find out who your real friend are.

Generally the ones who don’t mind you cancelling last minute and being late to everything.

25. It is the most expensive thing that will ever happen to you!

Having a chronically ill body is like someone dumping screaming baby triplets on you

and you didn’t even get to have the fun sex part for in the first place!

24. You can enjoy life with a chronic illness!

It might not seem like it when you first get diagnosed

and there are definitely days after that when you don’t have a great time.

But, much like healthy people, your ability to find the fun

is based on your personality and resilience

- bar any separate mental health conditions but we’ll get on to that…

A chronic illness diagnosis is not the end of the world.

23. People will annoyingly think you have the dream lifestyle.

“I would love to stay home in bed all day”

22. If someone says “you don’t look sick”, you will want to punch them.

Sometimes when people say “wow, you look really bad”

Thank you, thank you, thank you for seeing me on the inside!

I will be offended if you don’t mention how nice my hair is today though…

We all have different experiences and presentations of symptoms.

don’t look to those on the paths beside yours

“Well I can’t today, Brian! Deal with it!”

More often to other people with the same or similar conditions

who are either doing a lot better or a lot worse.

There is a high level of guilt embedded in this

but no one knows why and it’s not always intentional.

18. Plants and flowers will save your sanity.

Bring the outdoors indoors, get a little feel

for what you’re missing and you won’t be missing it too much.

It’s also great to have a hobby... like flower arranging.

When considering a new hobby, don’t just think of the energy it takes to do the thing itself

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30 Lessons about life with a chronic illness... [CC]

constantly

chronic

mental

vital