Living Well While Being Ill
What endometriosis taught me about life
Even as a toddler, I was fascinated with language. I’d spend hours sitting cross-legged with piles of colorful flashcards that were meant to teach my brain how to perceive the world and the people within it. I was taught the names of the colors that flooded my mind every time someone spoke. I was taught about all the noble occupations I could choose from one day (and somehow made the grown-ups laugh when I decided I wanted to be a vet, a farmer, and an astronaut). I was taught about opposites. Low, high. Big, small. Smile, frown…
But what if some opposites aren’t opposites at all?
“I have to cancel our meeting,” I bit my lip, ashamed that I was bailing for the third week in a row.
“Sorry to hear that you’re sick,” my PhD supervisor replied. The word again hung in the air between us, haunting me, though he didn’t speak it.
We don’t normally go through life craving a diagnosis. We fear it, do everything we can to avoid it, maybe even deny it. It’s a little strange to feel relief in the wake of a surgery that uncovers serious damage to vital organs and connections between them, yet never to have felt relief in the words “Good news, your test results are normal!” It’s even stranger to be jealous of others’ diagnoses, to wonder when…
