Description

How To Do Life With A Chronic Illness is for every person trying to find their way forward while managing a life-altering health condition. Within these pages, we’ll move away from the medical aspects of chronic illness that so often dominate the conversation, and instead focus on reconnecting with your identity and improving your quality of life as a whole.

When I was diagnosed with my own chronic illness (after many years of suffering in silence), I vividly remember leaving the appointment, crawling back into my bed at home to rest, and wondering what on Earth was supposed to happen from here. I was slowly getting to grips with managing my symptoms and accepting that there was only so much I could do to help myself from a clinical perspective… but what about the rest of my life? How was I going to engage with the things that bring me joy? What impact would this have on my identity and my place in the world? How would I hold onto my relationships with others? What could I do to still feel like ‘myself’, when all of the things that once made me ‘me’ now felt out of reach?

Over the last decade, I’ve begun to uncover some of the answers to these questions, and this book is the cumulation of all I’ve learned so far. Within these pages, we focus on the areas of life that for too long have been pushed to one side when we speak about chronic illness management. You’ll discover practical and actionable tips for adapting your hobbies and finding fatigue-friendly ways to socialise, and words of advice and affirmation around rediscovering your identity, learning to self-advocate, and identifying the things in life that matter most to you.

The twelve chapters of this book are:

1. Rediscovering Your Identity
2. Hobbies and Interests
3. Pacing and Condition Management
4. Friendships
5. Socialising
6. Stigma and Changing Attitudes
7. Mobility Aids
8. Dating and Relationships
9. Mental Health and Wellbeing
10. Finding Independence
11. Self-Advocacy
12. Goal Setting and Future Plans

Each chapter includes my own lived experiences and contributions from subject experts, and concludes with journal prompts where you can reflect on your own thoughts and perceptions. You can complete these inside the book with pen and paper, or use the code included in the introduction to access digital pages instead.

This book will warmly welcome you into the chronic illness community and remind you that you’re not alone in your struggles, while encouraging you to embrace the things that make you unique. There may be many ways your life has had to change to accommodate your access needs, but these pages will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to forge a new and exciting way forward… of course, with plenty of salty snacks and rest breaks along the way.

My biggest hope is that this book helps readers to sidestep some of the fear and anguish I experienced during the early years of my condition, and rediscover the good stuff in life much more quickly and painlessly than I did. I’ve endeavoured to provide comfort, advice, and genuinely useful tips that readers can be assured are coming from somebody who truly ‘gets it’. No toxic positivity or squashing down negative experiences. No patient-blaming. No guru woo-woo. Instead, just words of guidance (and a good dollop of self-deprecating humour, of course) to help you along as you learn to Do Life with a chronic illness in your own glorious way.

Find out more about the origins of How To Do Life With A Chronic Illness in this blog post, and watch my journey towards becoming a published author in this vlog on YouTube!

If you enjoy this book, my companion journal, Pave Your Way With Chronic Illness, is available now too!