Chronic illness downright sucks. It's total shit most of the time. But, even to my detriment, I'm an eternal optimist. I'm determined to look at the bright side of things, including life with chronic illness. So I decided to put my gratitude to the test and find 5 reasons I’m glad that I have chronic illness.

1. I learned to listen to my body

As a society, our default setting seems to be to blindly trust doctors. We tend to listen to then even over our own bodies. If a doctor says they can't find anything wrong, it's implied (or may be outright said), that your symptoms are now your fault. Perhaps they're in your head or not as bad as you're saying.

Once we're told the pain is our own fault, we learn to ignore our pain and symptoms to 'get on with things'. It’s standard practice to keep working when we're sick. Rest and relaxation has become a once a year only allowance. Before beginning my chronic illness journey, I would have done anything a doctor told me. It wasn’t until they started telling me things I knew not to be true, like I was imagining the pain, that I realised I needed to listen to my own body, regardless of what the doctors said.

2. I'm far kinder to myself

I’ve always had high expectations for myself. I would put pressure on myself to get straight A’s and high distinctions. I felt like I always had to be achieving something. Being sick felt like failure.

There are still times I can’t do anything for days or weeks. But now, if I’m in pain, I tell myself it is it is 100% okay to stay in bed. It's okay if I don't go for a run every day or cook the healthiest meals.

I’m doing my best so I try to remind myself of that instead of feeling like a failure.

3. I learned to advocate for myself

This is probably the most important lesson I’ve learned.

Kids are raised to listen to authority, which is of course important for raising respectful and kind children. But, we should be sure not to teach them to blindly obey authority to the detriment of themselves. We should never be afraid to advocate for ourselves.

I thought I had to do what the doctors told me. I was swayed by doctors who told me it was all in my head or that there was nothing I could do.

The first step on this crazy chronic illness journey was getting a diagnosis.

If you know anything about endometriosis, you know it takes an average of 7 to 10 years to be officially diagnosed, often because women are dismissed and not believed. But that's a whole other rant about the medical system and the way it treats women.

For me, the most important part of fighting for an endometriosis diagnosis was learning to advocate for myself and ensuring I wasn't gaslighted by the "health" system into giving up. I blatantly asked for surgery. I listened to my body telling me what I needed, then I asked for it, which can be far trickier and scarier than it sounds. It certainly wasn't easy to walk into the office of a gynaecologist with more than ten years experience and tell them how I wanted to be treated (in the medical sense), but it was infinitely worth it.

There's still a whole lot the medical world doesn't know. I generally don't advocate for using dr. google, it's easy to go down a rabbit hole and decide you definitely have terminal cancer. However, for me, it was a way to find that I wasn't struggling alone, that there were other people who had the same symptoms as me and didn't have doctors listening to them. It helped me find the strength to speak up and request options I hadn’t been offered.

4. I found a wonderful doctor

It took a long time to find a doctor willing to listen to me and, not only listen, but believe me. I went through about 5 before I found her. Now, I've been with the same doctor for more than six years and I have appointments basically every week.

I‘m still searching for a couple specialists I’m comfortable with, but I’m determined not to settle this time around, as my past doctors have made or broken my treatments and surgeries.

5. It gave me a new perspective

True, there’s plenty of easier ways to get a different perspective or walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. But I guess I never would have truly understood life with chronic illness, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue without living it myself. I can now understand this whole other community. About 15-30% of the world in fact.

Plus, I no longer procrastinate. There is no guarantee I will be functioning tomorrow. I seize the good moments I do have and am working on building my cohort of friends who understand that I might cancel plans last minute on a bad day or make them last minute on a good day.

Despite the many downs of chronic illness, I believe you can always find a few silver linings in life. I would LOVE to hear what positives you have found in living with chronic illness or other health struggles. Leave them in the comments below!