Description
“Like a cozy chat with a best mate, Pippa Stacey shares her years of wisdom to provide a groundbreaking, highly accessible guide to living well with chronic illness. This book should be prescribed on the NHS.”
Frances Ryan, Guardian columnist and author of Crippled
When you have a chronic illness, you’re usually dealing with very limited information. Post-diagnosis, you’re typically handed a few (well-intentioned but mostly useless) leaflets containing information about the medical aspects of your condition, such as symptoms and potential management strategies, and then simply sent off back home to figure out the rest for yourself.
Following my own diagnosis, I remember spending years wondering how on Earth I was supposed to… Do Life now. I was getting to grips with managing my symptoms and accepting that there was only so much I could do to help myself, but what about the rest of my life? How was I going to engage with the things that bring me joy? What impact has this had on my identity and my place in the world? How would I preserve and cherish my relationships with others? What could I do to still feel like ‘myself’, even alongside a life-altering health condition?
It’s of course important to take care of ourselves and we must continue advocating for more medical support and treatment options, but I can’t help but feel like chronic illness has been confined within the medical model of disability for too long. We deserve lives as rich and fulfilling as any other person, regardless of whether we have wonky bodies or not.
Therefore, I decided to focus this particular book on the areas of life that are often pushed to one side when we speak about chronic illness management. It contains practical tips in areas like friendship, socialising, and dating, to bespoke advice on rediscovering your identity, learning to self-advocate, and figuring out the stuff that truly matters to you. I want this book to serve as a reminder that even with our shared experiences of chronic ill health in an ableist world, we are all our unique and glorious selves and that our happiness matters just as much as anybody else’s.
Within these pages you’ll find additional resource lists and links to related videos, and each chapter concludes with a series of journal prompts. There’s space for you to complete these in the book if you wish, and there are also digital pages you can download if you require assistive tech or typing is a more accessible form of writing for you. No two chronically ill people are the same, so it felt important to regularly hold space for you to reflect on your own circumstances and identify the things that are most resonant with you.
This book is a true gift for anyone living with chronic illness. Pippa has written an invaluable guide to help you rediscover yourself, even when life looks different from how it did before. Stuffed to the brim with genuinely helpful, tangible tips, fresh perspectives on how to adapt everyday tasks, along with journal prompts and exercises to guide you in figuring out what “doing life” means to you-this is a book that I would have cherished reading when I was first diagnosed with a chronic illness many years ago (and saved me years of trying to figure it out on my own).
Natasha Lipman – Journalist & Host of The Rest Room Podcast
Essentially, this book is a cumulation of all the stuff I’ve had to figure out for myself over the past 10+ years. It contains plenty of my own lived experiences as well as those from a range of other chronically ill contributors, and I hope that the advice we share not only affirms and validates your own experiences, but equips you with the tools to Do Life in a way that works for you.
It took me a good few years to find my feet with all of this, but I hope this book helps you avoid some of that anguish and get to the good stuff in life *much* quicker and more painlessly than I did. No toxic positivity or squashing down negative experiences. No patient-blaming. No guru woo-woo. Instead, just realistic and genuinely useful advice to help you along your way… with a little touch of humour, of course.
The sales link on this page will take you to the book listing on Amazon, but you can also purchase from wherever you like to get your books. I hope you enjoy it!
- Grab your copy on Waterstones here*
- Grab your copy on Amazon here*
- Grab your copy on Bookshop.org here*
* [ad – affiliate links]. I earn an additional commission from any orders made via these links, at no extra cost to you!