chronicallyskilled

[chronicallyskilled]

[chronicallyskilled]

[chronicallyskilled]

Hardcore disassociating at the idea of it being almost September and this year has gone by in a blink. I’ve spent all year so focused on my new treatment that it somehow has made this year go by even faster than the previous chronically ill/housebound years. I’ve already lost so much of another year without getting better. It’s also overwhelms me that I haven’t been outside for even a brief moment since January. I told myself that my new treatment would get me better this year. But here we are in august and all I can say is that does not seem likely. I don’t know how many more years it will take to get better, if at all possible, and that’s what scares me the most.

[chronicallyskilled]

It’s giving T-Pain’s put you in the mansion somewhere in Wiscansin

i love halsey because she'll write lyrics like "a girl like that is a mother, must be tough/ a problem child, i was rough/ but what do you do with a difficult grown up?" and then in another song she'll rhyme "michigan" with "bitch again"

[chronicallyskilled]

Sometimes something bad happens to me and my first thought is ah yes a new topic for therapy

[chronicallyskilled]

being disabled is being torn between wanting to be a hermit and live alone for the rest of my life to not burden anyone else with my problems and my needs but also knowing that there’s no way i can survive on my own due to the limiting nature of my disability

[chronicallyskilled]

I’ve spent the last couple weeks in a really serious health flare up. I have a new friend who kept making jokes about my health as a way to cope with clearly not knowing how to talk about my health stuff. I finally set a boundary and asked that they not make jokes right now when it’s this scary and serious. They immediately stopped responding and I haven’t heard from them in a couple days. It has really triggered my loss issues surrounding my chronic illness. Because of past experiences, I’m now always worried that if I ask for too much, ask for something different, set a boundary, call someone out for saying something rude or hurtful about my health, that any of these things will be too much and people will just leave me because my health situation is too difficult.

I’m so afraid of that, because I’ve had it happen before. So I often tolerate shitty treatment because I’m afraid if I ask for what I need it will be too much. I have a couple friends who haven’t bothered to visit in a year (even though they know I’m isolated and housebound) and I just haven’t complained because I’m afraid I’ll lose the other aspects of their friendship if I demand too much of them. Chronic illness is already hard enough without wondering at what point you’re just gonna be too much for people and lose them.

[chronicallyskilled]

~A letter to Halsey just in case she sees it~

Dear Ashley,

I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time and you and your music were instrumental to my queer awakening and acceptance of myself back in 2015. I’m currently chronically ill and I have been either in the hospital or housebound for 3 years now. Your last album came out right as my health started rapidly declining and getting very very scary. In August and September 2021 I was going back and forth to the hospital almost every day for breathing issues, and then as things progressed my body started rejecting food and I began starving to death. Your music was one of the pieces of art that got me through an impossible and terrifying time when I had nothing else. I listened to “honey” on the way to the hospital while I was gasping for air. I was admitted to the hospital finally in October 2021 and remained in the hospital for 2 whole months. I listened to “darling” thinking about my family who didn’t bother talking to me or visiting me during this time. I listened to “I am not a woman, I’m a god” before scary procedures or when I needed to be brave before I got poked prodded and tested by doctors every single day. I almost died during that time, and since then I’ve lost 3 years of my life continuing to be ill and not being able to leave the house because of my illness. I’ve missed out on so much life these last few years, and I’ve suffered 100% of the time, never having a break from symptoms or pain for even a moment. Not to mention the sadness, loneliness, despair, etc etc.

Your new songs resonate with me deeply, because there is not much chronic illness representation in music. I’ve lost 100 pounds because of my illness, and I’ve dealt with a whole range of comments from people, for example: saying I’m finally attractive because I’m skinny, that I look sickly because I’m skinny, or a doctor saying other women would be jealous of me for losing so much weight and I should start a weight loss program for women (once again, I was starving to death). The bottom line is no one knows how to treat people with chronic illness, weight fluctuations, disabilities, etc. It heals my soul to get to listen to music that represents me right now (although I wish you didn’t have to experience it in the first place).

I’m not writing to ask you to keep making music. I love and value your music so much, and it has obviously been so meaningful to me. But I mainly wanted to reach out as someone who has also experienced their own personal hell, just to say I hope you do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself, whatever that looks like. As someone who has experienced a near death experience and has lost three years of my life, I don’t want to lose any more. If and when I ever get my life back, I only want to invest my time and energy in things and people that are good for me and matter to me.

I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this and that you’ve had to carry your burden in silence. I can’t understand your own unique illness experience, but I am sending you so much love. Thank you for your music and what it has given me. I hope if you make more music in the future, it makes you more whole rather than having to cut off parts of yourself. Remember you are so loved❤️

With love,

Angela

[chronicallyskilled]

The last couple weeks I’ve been dealing with a really scary level of weakness and fatigue. Normally, I can tell the source of my weakness, which allows me to get to the source and try to fix it to get back to my baseline level of sick instead of scary levels of sick. I couldn’t tell what was wrong this time, and felt the situation was escalating very quickly with not enough time to figure it out before something bad happened. I shared my experience and fears with my friends, and 3 different friends just responded with a “:(“. I know that it can be hard to know what to say in these situations, but responding with an emoji only feels like such low effort and almost like you’re giving up trying to comfort me in a perilous situation. But worse, after the emoji, they still have not checked up on me again and it’s been over a week. Even if a friend doesn’t know what to say, when I’m in crisis I still don’t want to feel alone or like you don’t care. So sending a sad face emoji and then being done with me has just felt so shit this week. It just made me feel even more than usual that I’m facing this mostly alone.

[chronicallyskilled]

I spend over 30 minutes each night after laying down trying to get in a sleeping position that doesn’t activate my symptoms. People don’t realize all the tedious parts of chronic illness. The weird and inconvenient and awful things that you have to think about constantly being ill, but those same things don’t have to cross the minds of able-bodied folks. Just simply laying down to even begin to attempt to fall asleep shouldn’t be an Olympic sport

[chronicallyskilled]

Came back to tumblr to read Halseys poetry but thinking of staying to share my own and really streamline concepts for a book I’m writing by getting it all out a little at a time and not taking it on all at once. It’s hard when you feel like there’s so many important things to say that you don’t know where to start. So I guess I’ll start here