If you have a chronic illness there is always the lurking question of where it begins and you leave off. You are always facing issues of how to go about making room for it to fit in your life. What stays, what gives??? What are you? At some point in the process, your worlds begin to collide and you are faced with the overwhelming and monumental task of reframing your identity. A job worthy of the best spin-doctors D.C. has to offer. Why even worry about that statement? its semantics, really. Just words that strung together start to define how we view ourselves. Married. Single. Professional. Patient. Whiner. Survivor. Winner. Loser. Each of these labels really can inform how we view ourselves and our place in this world. For the most part, one spends the fist 20 years of their lives figuring our what these words mean and the next phase of their lives trying them, seeing what feels like the best fit, which work the best with the other pieces in your personality wardrobe.

There is always an element of choice in how an individual chooses to wear these “clothes,” which outfit to put on any given day. The process of learning to live with an illness is really just like life, a path of constant learning, mistake making and facing challenges and if you are mindful of it all, reaping their rewards. You are thrown curveballs that you must catch and react to on a constant basis. With an illness, to keep with the wardrobe metaphor, you are essentially thrown a ill-fitting, ugly, messy overcoat that you come to find yourself, through no act of your own, forced to wear everyday for the rest of your life. But, in the end, you do find that what doesn’t change is your ability to accessorize, camouflage and coordinate it with the other pieces that actually never left your closet in the first place.