Living with Illness
Yours, or someone else’s.
At some point, almost all of us have to learn how to keep being a person while our body — or someone we love’s body — stops cooperating. Identity, energy, work, relationships, travel, grief. Living with Illness is the quieter, more reflective pillar of Anyway Life. The work of staying yourself.
The part nobody hands you a checklist for.
The system gives you appointments and prescriptions and instructions to follow up in three months. It doesn’t give you a framework for who you are now that this is true. It doesn’t tell you how to keep working, keep loving, keep traveling, keep being yourself with this new fact running underneath everything.
Living with Illness is the work of figuring that out. Some of it is practical — pacing, energy, what to keep on the calendar and what to take off. Some of it is logistical — how to fly with medications, how to talk to a partner or boss, how to plan a trip with a flare-up factored in. And some of it is harder to name — identity, grief, adaptation, the slow internal work of becoming someone who has this and is still a whole person.
This pillar is where the more reflective writing lives. The essays. The travel guides. The honest conversations about work and relationships. It’s also the pillar that holds true if you are not the sick one — if you are walking through this alongside someone you love.
Six places to start.
The shape of a full life, around an illness that won’t leave.
Identity & Adjustment
The slow internal work of becoming someone with a diagnosis — without becoming only the diagnosis. The grief of an old self. The making of a new one.
Energy, Pacing & Daily Life
The spoon theory, the energy envelope, the math you have to learn so the week doesn’t collapse. Practical, kind, and honest about limits.
Work & Career
Disclosure, accommodations, FMLA, working from home, working through, and the bigger questions about whether the job still fits. Career inside a body that’s changed.
Relationships
Telling people. Not telling people. Partners, family, friends, the slow rearrangement of who shows up. The grief of what shifts, the grace of what stays.
Travel Anyway
Travel with a chronic illness isn’t reckless. It’s a skill. Pacing, prep, packing, accessibility, medication logistics, the right insurance, and the quiet confidence that you can still go.
Explore Travel Anyway →Grief & Adaptation
For the patient, for the caregiver, for anyone watching someone they love change. The grief that doesn’t make headlines. The adaptation that becomes a life.
“Life doesn’t pause for illness. It unfolds inside it — and you can still build something meaningful, anyway.”
— Heather
Essays & reflections on Living with Illness.
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The First Time I Got Sick
I was 28 years old when I first got sick. I had never really been sick before. Doctor visits were occasional—annual physicals if I remembered, the kind of appointments most people in their 20s don’t think much about. The only time I had ever been in the hospital was to give birth. And then, suddenly,… Read →
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Is this a TikTok Diagnosis?
I had a heart attack in 2023. At 42 years old. Young, by healthcare standards. I wasn’t diabetic. I didn’t have high blood pressure. I didn’t have high cholesterol. I didn’t have a family history of heart disease. There was nothing about my profile that suggested this should happen. And then it did. The Speed… Read →