I shared my ‘invisible illness‘ blog on Facebook, and in the comments someone suggested I had more to write on the subject. I told her writing the blog made me quite depressed, putting my health situation ‘out there’, in public. For me it seemed to concretize what was going on, to make it all the more real, all the more inescapable. And not long after writing the post – although I can’t prove a connection (there were other factors) – I had a serious CFS/M.E. relapse, putting me entirely in bed for nearly a week. It was the most serious relapse I’d had for months. Imagine having a severe tropical illness, or something like pneumonia, and you are in hospital. You are on the road to recovery, but still bed-bound. This is how such a relapse manifests for me.

I had felt something coming on for several days prior, one of my least favourite chronic symptoms rachetting up: a sensation of pressure in my head, combined with intense bi-lateral tinnitus increasing in volume from the time I wake in the morning until I go to bed, at which point it is almost unbearable. I can do nothing but listen to the clanging, a tone of a school alarm alerting you to a change of class, or the sound of a fire alarm in a public building. It is this particular tone. I’d have a digit removed if it meant this symptom could magically disappear. It started about 3 years ago, and occurs every single day. It’s worse when I’m tired or ill, but it’s always there. An alarm going off inside my skull.

What I haven’t written about my health situation is my anger. My profound despair. My hopelessness. My depression. Much of the time I ‘manage’. I’m good at managing. If my symptoms are fairly consistent and not entirely debilitating, and if I can apply some kind of routine to my day, and if, every so often I am well enough to get out to meet with a friend, I am not angry. I am not despairing. I am managing. Those emotions sit there quietly in the back waiting until I am once again thrown into incapacitation as I was last week. Then I think to myself, “I cannot carry on like this, I just cannot.” When I am so debilitated I can’t write, I cannot see friends, I can barely even read. Life doesn’t feel as if it is worth living. These are hard times.

I went through a protracted period of incapacitation about a year ago, and I realised I had to take stock. If my life was to continue like this, then what? I was at the end of my tether. I have been suicidal in my life, I have had several breakdowns, but this was not that. This was taking a good hard look at my situation. The facts. I knew I needed two things: nature, and a community. I needed to be in a place where close friends would be willing to come to me, to sit quietly perhaps, to make me a cup of tea. Or not, just to be in the house, so I can hear them chat away to themselves. The clink of cups. A kettle boiling. When I am ill it is often better for me to be alone, but I like to know there are people nearby.

Until that point I was very isolated. I had no friends in this city I’d been living in for five years (word of advice: if you have a chronic illness, are a writer, do not have a ‘job’, have no children, do not go to church, and your partner’s work takes them away for nearly six months of the year, do not move to a city where you don’t  really know anyone). It’s not that I don’t have friends, I do, several wonderful friends, but most of them do not live in the country I live in. Isolation is well documented to adversely affect health.

So, I forced myself to teach once a month (doing any kind of regular work, a normal ‘job’, has been impossible for decades, as I never know when I might be too ill to do the work).

My teaching has brought a handful of beautiful people into my life. But it’s not enough, particularly since they don’t live within walking distance.  This is what I call community. Someone next door. Someone across the way. A tiny village.

Nature is our minuscule patio filled with the sound of the industrial fans from the shop beneath us and the shop beside us. The patio is also a thoroughfare for those working in the shop below, so is never private. There are no parks near enough for me to walk to, and although the English Channel is but ten minutes away, it entails crossing a highway. This might not seem like a big deal but I am so noise sensitive (hyperacusis) going near this road actually hurts.

We need to move, not just because where we live is not conducive to my health, but also because our overheads are unsustainable. And then I worry: if we move far, to a new place, what happens to the friends I’ve managed to make here? Will I have to start over? What about the wonderful psychiatrist homeopath I am able to see nearby on the NHS? The TCM practitioner I’ve just found? There are so many other factors that make any kind of move complex and difficult, let alone the actual move itself. This is barely conceivable for me to manage.

Everything feels like a catch-22.

I have avoided talking about my anger about my illness. It’s not present right now. Anger is not an emotion I feel frequently. I can count on my two hands the times I’ve actually been enraged. I’m not suppressing anger, it’s just not there. But I am angry about my illness. I do not feel I signed up for this. I remember a friend, some years ago, telling me I did not seem like a sick person. I do not have the profile of a chronically ill person, whatever that is. Does anyone sign up to be ill? No, of course not. Also, I do not believe we are given these challenges by the universe to “teach” us something.

But we do have an opportunity to take a look at how we react to challenges, how we are ‘with’ whatever is going on. We can learn from what we are going through.

In the early years of my illness, when it manifested as bouts of acute bacterial and viral infections, I learned something: if I fought what was going on (a literal physical sensation of trying to push my body, my discomfort, away from me), it worsened the symptoms.  If I physically relaxed, and was ‘with’ what is, things eased. I did not get well, but my experience of whatever was going on improved.

Now that the progression of the illness has changed, now that each day includes long periods of discomfort, I am neither with nor against what is happening. I am simply bearing it. Even when I tell myself “I cannot bear this.” I am bearing it. I have no other choice. I will not end my life, even though sometimes it feels as if my life is ending me.

I have avoided talking about my despair. In my blog about having an invisible illness I linked to a post in the New Yorker about memoirs of disease. One of the memoirs is ‘Sick’ by Porochista Khakpour. I haven’t read it. I had come across it some time ago, and thought I should. Porochista Khakpour was finally diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and treated with antibiotics amongst other things. A few days ago I decided to find out how she was doing. What I discovered was the thousands of dollars it took for her to be diagnosed and treated. More money than I have, far, far more. She raised much with crowd funding. I am not sure I could do this: my shame around my illness prevents me (another thing I haven’t written about). And then I learned she is still not well. By the time I finished reading all this, I could barely breathe. I don’t have the money to pay for this kind of testing or treatment. And even if I do, it may not make an iota of difference.

I was at rock-bottom. Sick, despairing, hopeless.

But at the bottom there is nowhere else to look but up. Once again, I knew I had to take stock. I had to turn my focus to the aspects of self that are not my illness.

I recently won a prize for my writing (I cannot announce the details publicly for a few weeks), and I am reminded: I am not just a sick person. I am also a writer, even if all I can do is to think about what I would like to write. I am also a friend, even if all I can do is talk to you on WhatsApp.

I am still here and the day will unfold with its challenges. I haven’t given up yet.