Confessions of a Body in Revolt

CONFESSIONS SERIES – POST # 1

Living with invisible illness is like carrying around a secret you never volunteered to keep. From the outside, on some days I may look “fine. I have been losing weight without trying for the last 1.5 years. At first people gave me compliments for my weight loss and how I look nice, but eventually I even got compared to a toothpick. At about 100 lbs now, I can walk into a room well mostly only virtually, smile, hold a conversation, on rare occasions even make jokes. But inside my body is a storm—gastroparesis twisting my stomach and often making me throw up even water, every joint aching with fire from autoimmune inflammation, my damaged nerves causing me dizziness often when I move from sitting to standing or from standing to walking. And not to mention, layered on top of it all, there is the constant mental weight of managing bipolar disorder and the fear of when a bipolar episode might show up.

It all started with an innocent myomectomy (Fibroid removal surgery) in Jan 2024. Since then, my entire life has turned upside down. One issue after another, constant pain, nausea, vomiting and rapid weight loss. The hardest part of it all isn’t just the symptoms themselves. But it’s the body’s revolt against me. It is the betrayal of a body that doesn’t always cooperate with the life I imagined for myself these days; a body that revolts against waking up with plans for the day, only to find my energy evaporated before noon. The betrayal of my memory, when brain fog steals the words, I know I just was about to say minutes ago.

I have been learning to cope, because most days I don’t have much hope of finding a solution as this painful journey of not many answers and confusion and dismissals has been going on for over 21 months at this point. Heck, some days I feel even the medical system I think just wants my body to just miraculously cure itself. While I have always been a fighter and consider myself a phoenix that rises from its ashes, in this case, I am learning new ways to cope. It has not been easy. I often completely try to dissociate from my body saying that “my body is suffering, my body is in pain, my body is in revolt”. But I’ve also come to realize that honesty is a kind of medicine. That saying, “Today was hard, and here’s why” can be a relief both to myself and to anyone who’s been carrying their own silent battles. I don’t share this to invite pity. I share it because I know I’m not alone. Invisible illnesses are everywhere—at work, in families, in friendships. And the more we tell the truth about what it’s really like, the less invisible we all become.

This is my confession. My body seems to be betraying me in ways I never thought possible. And yet, somehow, I’m still here, still writing, still fighting to make meaning out of the chaos.

Maybe this is resilience: not the absence of struggle, but the decision to keep showing up anyway despite often not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel. May be maturity is accepting that there may or may not be light at the end of the tunnel but one must carry on looking for the light because faith is a lot stronger than hopelessness.