Self-care is not always big, beautiful or glamourous. Sometimes, self-care looks like surrendering, stopping pushing, stepping back. Sometimes, self-care is wiping down two cupboards and leaving the washing up for tomorrow. Sometimes, self-care is not being mean to yourself when you don’t accomplish your ‘to-do’ list. Sometimes, self-care is action over affirmations. Self-care can even be putting less on your to-do list and leaning into the reality that we aren’t robots and that’s ok. There are times when healing can feel very far away. When we’ve tried everything and then we’ve tried everything else. If you are here, please hear me when I say this doesn’t mean it’s your fault…

Read Diagnosis Denial for Experts Part 1: Shame, Blame and Adulting here. Sometimes, after difficult health news, you feel like going back to the doctor and saying “There must have been some mistake. I am supposed to be brilliant. I have a life, I don’t have time to be sick. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me, I have other plans.” You feel, quite frankly, done, over, finished with all this illness stuff and now the doctors can do their job, sort it out and you can get back to the thousand things you have to do, which make up your LIFE. Looking for Miracle Cures I spent a year…

When I was finally diagnosed with my first autoimmune diagnosis, I was relieved – relieved to actually have a diagnosis. For somebody to put a name and a label on everything I was going through. (And finally, after all the years, they did believe me.) It was really happening, I hadn’t ‘gone crazy’ or just become really, really unfit, or whatever other fears my mind could throw up. If it had a name, that was something to hold onto. If it had a name, I could find out about it, and I could look for a cure and make it all go away, and get my life back. At the…