12/02/2025
No one wants to be the sick girl.
No one grows up imagining their body will turn into a full-time job, a mystery, or an enemy they have to negotiate with every single day.
We had plans. Goals. A whole timeline of who we thought we’d become.
But chronic illness has a way of rearranging everything without asking permission.
And suddenly, the life you once dreamed of gets replaced with a new kind of dream… one only sick people understand.
Because healthy people dream in milestones, vacations, promotions, and adventures.
And people like us?
Our dreams shift…not because they’re smaller, but because they’re rooted in what matters most.
We start dreaming in essentials. In presence. In the kind of well-being that money can’t buy and hustle can’t create.
We dream of the life we want to fully live… not just rush through. We dream about waking up with energy. We dream about having a clear mind. We dream about simply feeling “normal” again…whatever that even means now.
Our “hope list” becomes things most people don’t even realize are privileges…a morning without pain…a day without dizziness…a week without a flare…a body that doesn’t betray us.
And while we hold onto those tiny hopes, we also carry the awareness that things may never go back to how they were.
We grieve the person we used to be… even while we’re fighting to love the person we’re becoming.
And here’s the part no one really talks about…
Chronic illness, for all the pain and chaos it brings, also cracks you open in ways that create a different kind of beauty.
It slows life down enough for you to see what truly matters.
It softens your heart in places you didn’t know needed softening.
It deepens relationships in a way that “healthy life” rarely demands.
Because when you’re sick, you learn who loves you in the quiet ways…who shows up when nothing about you is shiny or easy…who sits with you in the heaviness…who stays gentle on the days you’re running on fumes.
Illness has given me and my spouse a kind of intimacy, depth, and meaning that most couples never touch…not because they can’t, but because life never forces them to slow down long enough to find it.
There’s a different kind of love that grows in the hard places. A tender, sacred, soul-level love built in the in-between moments…the ER nights, the calm-before-a-flare mornings, the “you rest, I’ve got you” moments that feel small but mean everything.
It’s a strange gift, this life. Not one we would’ve chosen…but one that still offers pockets of beauty most people will never experience.
A kind of beauty born from truth, vulnerability, and a love that survives what should have broken it.
No one chooses this life. But it chooses us and that’s a truth we learn to face without letting it swallow us.
Because even sick girls have an insane amount of resilience. We still love deeply. We still show up for our people. We still find joy in the smallest pockets of our days.
We still laugh. We still try. We still hope.
And somewhere in the middle of all the symptoms, sadness, strength, and survival… we realize something powerful….
We didn’t get weaker. We didn’t lose ourselves. We didn’t become victims.
We became warriors in bodies that don’t play fair.
So no, no one wants to be the sick girl.
But if this is the life we were handed, you better believe we’re going to live it with grit, with grace, and with a level of courage most people will never understand.
Author unknown
