There is a particular, three hour hike stretch of land on the coast of Italy. If you ask me to go to one of my happy places, I go there in my head. In fact, while I haven’t been there in over a decade, I go there in my head all the time. It was a hike I did during my backpacking trip around Europe with my best friend at 28, right after I quit my fashion marketing job that was no longer benefiting me. It was the beginning of my road to understanding chronic illness, the human body, and acceptance, too.

The road if I recall was not on the Cinque Terre map and that made it a little less crowded. We had started it at 8am to avoid the heat. It was not just me and my best friend, Farah, but Bethy, an Australian woman we had adopted in the hostel. Traveling for weeks alone with your best friend is a delight, but I think we were eager to relish some new company. 

Beth—who’s nickname was Bethy, something she revealed in passing and I never forgot—was an Australian 28-year-old traveling around Italy on her own before she was supposed to meet up with her entire family. She was blonde with medium length hair, and had a very small burst capillary in her eye. She was a delight. We bonded over our shared age—in the hostel, together, we were some of the oldest people there, and and we had mutual interests, as slightly older people in a hostel who were not partying.

I can still see bits and pieces of the view of the hike in my mind. The stunning color of the blue Mediterranean sea, a sea I was so familiar with, usually standing from the angle of Alexandria, Egypt. I loved watching the water kiss the shore, and then retreat. The path winded along the coast, following the water, and was a simple, narrow, dirt road, causing us to walk in a single file line. The vegetation and trees were also beautiful, and provided us with much needed shade.

Somewhere, about halfway through the hike, we took a break under a tree that offered us enough shade, with a flat patch of ground underneath it. Farah and I had bought some cheese and bread. Under the tree, we drank water, rested, and made sandwiches to eat. It was so simple, and so beautiful. I will never forget that hike, that piece of land in Italy.

Bethy was wearing a knee brace. I can’t remember exactly how she got it, but she was nursing a knee injury back to health, and it was an impediment to her trip and her life. Farah had chronic back pain. The story goes that when we were roommates in Egypt years before, Farah was at a beach with her cousins. She stepped on a slippery piece of rock while wading in the water, fell, and hit her tailbone. This one moment would dictate years to come, as she hurt her spine, which was fragile due to her lifelong aversion to dairy. Meanwhile, I had ankle pain. Hiking in Hawaii for my birthday with Farah a year before, I stepped on an unstable rock, and wasn’t supported me. My ankle twisted, and for a long time, any time I walked beyond a certain amount, my ankle hurt.

“Oh, my knee,” I recall Bethy saying. “Oh, my back,” Farah would respond. “Oh, my ankle,” I said. We laughed out loud together. I’ll never forget that laugh. Someone suggested that maybe aging is just when you have an injury you can complain about. We all accepted that.

My friend Jac has been sick for many weeks. It started off as what she thought was a cold, but has persisted for far too long to be that, with strange symptoms like fatigue, so much fatigue that she needs unusually more sleep, including naps in the daytime. She has headaches, and for a while she had respiratory symptoms that have subsided. The doctors she’s seen here in Mexico City are stumped, and suggested she may have some sort of chronic inflammation. 

Chronic conditions are awful. As a person who has suffered through my own chronic illnesses, some still present and some past, I felt for my friend. Since that day on the coast of Italy, I have developed many. Some are gone, funnily enough. Some creep up now and then, and I manage them, like the insomnia. And some are chronic, and I have been told they will last forever, though I don’t believe that, like the tinnitus in my ear.

Last night, on my couch, with pizza, Jac and I discussed the tinnitus and what happened. There was an accident last year. I have written about it before, and it significantly changed my life, seemingly for the worse, and but really for the better. Tinnitus is a trip. Essentially, my understanding is the buzzing sound in my ear is the exact frequency I cannot hear anymore.

To put it more clearly, a bit over a year ago, I lost some of my hearing to nerve damage. The buzzing in my ear is an exact match to the sounds in the world I can’t hear. So if a bug is buzzing, and it matches the frequency I lost, I can’t hear it. But it’s not like I can’t hear it because I just can’t perceive it, like a zero, or a non-existent neutral sound. I can’t hear it because the buzzing in my ear exists at the same frequency. I can’t hear the buzzing of the bug, because the sound in my ear covers it.

This may sound strange, but the most simple explanation is that the sound I can no longer perceive is the exact sound I hear only in my head, 24 hours a day.

The sound I hear is the one I can’t hear.

It is only in my head, mind you. When I say “in my ear,” that is an oversimplification. When the nerve is damaged in the way mine was, the brain sort of compensates for the missing sound by creating it. The sound does not exist anywhere. It is a figment of creation of my brain, and literally, the sound goes up or down depending on my perception of it. In silence and stillness, of course, it is easy to put all my attention to it. Silence has a different sound. But if I am active, or busy, or talking to someone, or listening to something, I can’t hear it. Paradoxically, to check if I can hear it, I hear it. To not hear it is a choice to not put attention on it, but it’s hard. It, like many things, only exists with attention, which is hard not to give it.

See? I told you. Tinnitus is a trip.

It has given me many things. The first thing it gave me was an autism diagnosis, something I have had mixed feelings about, but for the most part, am glad to have gotten. It explained so much in my life, like a missing link. I am so glad to know I am autistic. The tinnitus in a way gave me the power to step out of corporate culture, even though I was afraid, and even though it wasn’t my choice. And it has given me a lot of ideas—still not fully formulated into learnings—about perception, attention, and existence. But it has also given me thoughts about chronic conditions and why they exist. The tinnitus has indeed sparked a lot of thoughts of many existence of many things, that I am still on the road to understanding.

In a strange way, I am truly fascinated not just with my human body, but the fact that this sound can exist. It is just one strange chronic condition, that we consider bad, don’t like, and makes us sad. No one ever gives tinnitus any credit for anything positive, and I get that. It isn’t comfortable, and not something I like. 

But I don’t reject it. Because I learned that lack of acceptance is definitely one of the things that prolongs and worsens chronic illness. Acceptance is the most important part of healing illness.

I learned this from the insomnia. While the beginning of my experience with the tinnitus and hearing loss was literally physically painful—have you ever had an injection to your eardrum? The insomnia was worse. Acceptance was hard to say the very least.

The insomnia was over two years of sleeplessness. It ruled my life. Like a queen over her domain that was my body, what insomnia said, went. Insomnia to you may be a word on a page. To me, the word insomnia, in each little letter, contains pages from one of the most painful chapters of my life. I don’t often revisit that chapter. I let the word contain the experience. It is over, and it gave me things.

The insomnia is called “the” insomnia, like “the” tinnitus, because I don’t like to call chronic illnesses mine. Put them on like your hat or your shoes, and it becomes much more difficult to accept chronic illness. For those two years, insomnia felt like mine. “My insomnia,” I called it. It started immediately when I realized I had to divorce my first husband. I could sleep fine but would wake up too early, no matter the time I slept. At first it was 6:30. Then 6:00. Then 5:30. Then 5:00. Then 4:30. Then 4:00.

If you have ever not been able to sleep, you know what that’s like. If you’ve had a stretch of sleeplessness, say a week, you know what that’s like too, and it sucks. Now, use your imagination as best you can. Imagine what it may feel like to sleep poorly for two years. Quite frankly, I don’t want to use any more color to describe it. It’s a part of my life that I honor, understand, and appreciate for what it gave me. But I can still admit that I did not like how I felt. 

I was beside myself. I was losing my mind. I wanted to sleep so badly. What started from anxiety and fear from my ex-husband, became daily anxiety and fear from sleep itself. The more I wanted sleep, the less I did. It seemed like sleep was everywhere I was not. I tried to stop wanting to sleep so badly because I realized it psyched me out, but it was no use—of course I wanted to sleep. How could I accept not sleeping?

Despite the fact that I knew the anxiety caused the insomnia, and that acceptance of the insomnia would reduce the anxiety, I was not able to accept the insomnia. This isn’t because I am a bad person, or dumb, or whatever—but because acceptance is hard! You probably find it hard too! Especially when you have to accept something that you don’t want. 

It was hard to avoid. Thinking that accepting the insomnia meant accepting not sleeping for the rest of my life made me sad. The future is vast and unknown, and we can’t make such sweeping generalizations about it. That’s not smart or even realistic. But in that moment, it seemed like it was all there, looming ahead of me—an open road signifying my life, alongside a shadowing figure called insomnia, forever. 

Accepting it didn’t necessarily mean it would stay, or that it would go. It just meant accepting. Yet, to accept the circumstances as they were, and say I am okay with you, insomnia, was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I just couldn’t do it. For two years.

In hindsight, I have so much compassion for myself. I am a master at acceptance now, though I still can stumble. I do it all the time. That is part of why my life seems so easy to outsiders. I just accept things, don’t attach so much to the results, and overall live a healthy and aligned life.

I pulled out a bottle of aloe vera pulp I bought from the health food store to give some to Jac. As my friend is experiencing chronic illness, I want nothing more than to be able to help. Though maybe I am trying to save her from an experience she needs to have—I don’t know. But maybe part of that experience is actually having a friend who cares. I sure hope it is, because I cannot help it. Jac is my friend. I care.

Aloe vera pulp, especially pure, is not cute. It doesn’t smell or taste good, but it has a slew of health benefits, and since we don’t know what’s going on with Jac, I figured it couldn’t hurt. I asked her if she wanted some. I warned her it didn’t taste good, but she wanted to try it. As I have been feeling off lately too, I poured some for myself, one ounce for each of us. 

“How did you do that?” Jac said as she recoiled from the taste, watching me down it in two gulps. Jac was a mix of amused, surprised, and amazed, and called me a badass. Jac asked if I had juice to hide the flavor in, but we had none. Requesting honey, I shuffled through the cabinets while Jac was on the couch, a sense of comfort we have developed in our friendship permeating the space, such that there is little formality between us anymore.

“I am a believer in just cracking things open,” I told her. “My thought is, if you have to do something, if you have to face something, if it is simply unavoidable—don’t avoid it.” Lean right in. Just do it. Accept it. Embrace it. Jump right into the open mouth that’s waiting for you. Don’t overthink by attaching to what it could mean. Resistance is futile. If you have to deal with it no matter what, what are you waiting for? Be brave. Accept the circumstance. For God’s sake, jump!

This works on anything for me. Having a disagreement with your partner? Make some coffee, sit down, and talk. Mad at a friend? Break open the subject, even if it is easier to avoid it. Something broken in your house? Go to Home Depot. Today. Not tomorrow. Buy the materials. Fix it. What do you genuinely get from ignoring it, shoving it away, pretending it doesn’t bother you, saying it’s fine?

What do you genuinely get from resisting acceptance?

Most of the time, what we think we get from resisting acceptance, is avoiding the hard talk, or hard interaction, or hard work. But either accept the hard things, or we live in the ramifications of not—an unhappy marriage, a lost friendship, a broken home. 

What we also get from resisting acceptance, primarily, is fear. 

We resist things we are afraid of. It’s that simple. I was afraid of accepting insomnia because I thought that would make it more prevalent in my life. The truth was, I was afraid, in general. What would actually happen if I accepted it was unknown. I was afraid to accept not sleeping, even though I was already not sleeping. I was afraid to accept, because I didn’t know what acceptance would mean. I was afraid of what may happen next, while resisting the present fear. And meanwhile, the present was already happening. 

I was afraid of being afraid. 

General fear in life comes from this fear we all have that we don’t know what we’re doing in our lives. One wrong move and maybe, we’ll blow the whole thing up. It’s as if we forget that for millennia, humans have existed with the same humanity, with the same fear. We forget it’s just life. No one makes it out alive anyway, and all of us make it to the end just fine. The end is the same for us all. Why do we take it so seriously?

Fear is the thing we’re all afraid of, all the time, and the more we refuse to admit that the elephant is in the room, the more it hangs out, the bigger it gets. We are afraid of fear itself as a society and as humans. Facing your fears in that way is also a part of the human condition. That’s why Franklin D. Roosevelt was right. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”

I was in a beachside town off the coast of the state of Oaxaca, with my husband. We met a local man who owns a hostel. Esteban spent much of his day husking coconuts at the coconut stand he owns, right out front the hostel. My husband befriended him, and we ended up staying and hanging out on the coconut stand for a while.

As I watched Esteban husk the coconuts, I marveled at him. Chop, chop, chop! To husk a coconut, you need a machete, big, whacking motions, and to avoid cutting your hand, the one holding the coconut. I felt afraid for him, but he husked and husked—many people wanted coconuts! Esteban kept going.

I couldn’t help but ask how he knew that the machete wouldn’t hurt him. He seemed so confident as he husked. “It’s not the knife that cuts you, it’s the fear,” he said, very matter of factly, leaving me in a space of reflecting on what he meant for many weeks.

Yes, I understood the words, but what did he mean? Whatever idea he communicated, it was as if he knew it was true, with a great deal of conviction, that he couldn’t just transfer to me. I kept wondering, until some weeks later, back home in Mexico City, I was boiling some water to put in my hot water bottle to nurse some cramps.

I’ve had this hot water bottle for a while, and I get cramps near my period, so none of this was new for me. But as I held the tea kettle to pour the water in the bottle, I had this distinct feeling—what if I spill on myself? The water was literally boiling. Then, at that exact moment, my hand holding the tea kettle started to shake, almost on command, it was so uncanny. The kettle, which I have held and poured into the hot water bottle many times, started to shake not because a tea kettle is dangerous, but because I was afraid. My feeling literally changed the nature of the circumstance, right then and there, in a way I know is real.

I reflected on Esteban more. Maybe 15 minutes after he explained how the machete holds no fear, he was husking a coconut and got sort of close to his finger. He didn’t even notice, but Carlos, my husband, did. “Whoa,” he said. “That got kind of close.”

Esteban laughed and brushed it off. I don’t think for a moment he held fear, he just laughed and acknowledged Carlos was right, and moved on, continuing to whack at the coconut. I was additionally amazed that he didn’t for a moment say, “ah I need a break from husking,” or “gosh that was scary.” He just collected himself, immediately, really without even a moment, and kept husking. Whereas he could’ve put that on as a fear or later as a trauma, he chose not to, not by ignoring his feelings, which is different and not healthy, but by accepting what happened, and moving on. To me, it was clear that acceptance is something he is used to practicing.

As I witnessed the tea kettle shake in my hand and I understood what Esteban meant, I instinctively stopped. I stopped being afraid by accepting that fear was there, so the kettle suddenly stopped shaking. My hand was totally steady. I poured the water in the hot water bottle as normal. 

The distinct feeling—what if I spill on myself?—was not the feeling. If you look at a feeling wheel, feelings are emotions. Feelings include things like lonely, rushed, disheartened, deflated, proud, amazed, worried, frustrated. Feelings are exactly that—feelings. You are not feeling “like you are not listening to me,” you are feeling unheard. You are not feeling “like this is the most wonderful day of my life,” you are feeling joyful. 

The other words are the ones you associate with the feeling, like “you are not listening to me.” It’s not that they’re invalid, but words are what your mind uses to describe the feelings using language. The feeling of emotions, which is what we are talking about, are body sensations. Any words your mind produces are just thoughts. The words are what your mind uses to attach to the feeling. You can see if you said “I think you are not listening to me,” that does not leave room for discussion and exploration, even with yourself. Meanwhile taking the words as the feeling itself leaves less room for discussion and reflection, because feelings are always valid. 

The words you attach to are not feelings, but thoughts disguised as feelings. They’re basically descriptors for why you feel the way you feel, and they’re useful in a way, except that sometimes, our thoughts don’t serve us. They’re very tricky, those thoughts, because as we know, not all of our thoughts are true or good for us, and it can be hard to see that we don’t have to jump on a train of thought to a bad place, like one of self-deprecation or conflict. You can’t trust your thoughts all the time, until you learn to trust yourself—an idea to discuss another time. 

In meditation we say to practice not to attach to things or feelings. This is what they are talking about. That’s one of the points of meditation, to teach us non-attachment to even our thoughts. Being able to detach from thoughts helps us differentiate an emotion, a body sensation with no words, from a thought, which is associated with the world in your mind. An emotion, my psychiatrist told me in the depth of my depression with the tinnitus and the new autism diagnosis, lasts no more than 90 seconds. It’s the thinking that trips us up and extends the pain. It’s the attachment. It’s the words that we attach to, that create circumstances for emotions that won’t pass, because we avoid feeling the emotion, while we ruminate on the words.

The distinct thought of “what if I spill on myself?” came from fear. But to acknowledge that fear was the emotion, and let it pass—well, that let it pass. 

To acknowledge the words are not feelings but an association the mind makes with the feeling, helps the feelings pass too. But acknowledging the words came from my mind also helped me not hold onto the idea that I shouldn’t trust the tea kettle. Had I been attached to the idea, I undoubtedly would have fumbled the tea kettle, which would have reinforced the fear that I had created myself, and made it real—this can be a vicious cycle for a lot of people who think the world is just objectively bad. 

You have self-defeating thoughts based on your unprocessed feelings, you attach to thoughts that construct and affect your reality, and before you know it, you live in an endless loop of a self-fulfilling prophecy that you just take as objective reality. Yikes.

Have you ever noticed that when you are more afraid something will happen it does? That when you feel like you won’t get the job, you don’t? Or when you feel like someone doesn’t like you, you get treated poorly?

You might say that if you feel like you won’t get the job, that’ll affect your performance in the interview, and the same for your friend. If you agree, then you see my point—which is that emotions carry energy that affect our day to day life. It’s just easier to see in the interview example than the machete, because the recipient of the energy in the interview is a person and not a knife. But all things can be affected by your energy. That’s why we have to learn to manage and harness our energy well.

It’s funny how afraid we are of experiencing emotions, these things we can’t see, just like I don’t like experiencing the tinnitus, another thing I can’t see. Emotions only carry power when you give it to them—the second you tell an emotion, “hey, I am not afraid of you, let’s crack this open, and jump right in,” it almost immediately disappears. That’s the power of acceptance.

Even happiness. Sometimes I am gripped with a feeling that feels so good like joy or pride. A warmth fills my body, and as I dive head first into it to enjoy it, it passes, just gone. I miss it for a moment, and then accept that it is gone. I know I’ll have more feelings in the future, bad or good, and that is okay, none of them are really bad if we learn to accept them. It’s more that they’re all here to teach us something about ourselves, but some are easier to experience than others, until you have some practice. And if I’ll have more feelings in the future, well, that means I will also have “bad” feelings, but that seems like a fair tradeoff with the good ones. There’s no reason to be afraid. 

The machete did not instill fear in Esteban that day and neither did the tea kettle me, but for a long time, insomnia made me shudder. All day long, I would either think about how I hadn’t slept last night, and might not sleep that night. That made me attach to feelings of fear and anxiety, which was what was keeping me up at night—not the insomnia. The insomnia wasn’t real. It’s a word that means sleeplessness. The one not doing the sleeping was me. I was the one preventing myself from sleeping. I was the one who couldn’t sleep because I was so afraid of not sleeping. I was the one who couldn’t sleep because I was afraid.

It took two years, hypnosis, a change of diet, medicine, vitamins, smoothies, exercise, and overall, a healthy lifestyle to overcome the insomnia, and honestly sometimes it still pays me visits in the form of a bad night of sleep, or a stretch of bad sleep. But whether or not that is just one bad night of sleep, or a lasting thing, or a thing with the name insomnia, is my choice. Am I afraid to sleep? Then I won’t sleep. If I recognize it as something that just happened last night, and don’t attach to it with my thoughts, I won’t experience feelings around it. Besides, it’s back there. In the past, behind me. To attach to it, is truly my choice.

Lately, I have been waking up between 6:00 and 7:00, and you know what? I don’t mind. I actually have come to really enjoy my mornings alone, before my husband wakes up. I like the quiet solitude of a moment by myself, with coffee and green tea, before I start my writing for the day, and I usually wrap up a little after Carlos wakes up. It’s nice. I like waking up early actually. Reverse maintenance insomnia is the kind of insomnia that happens when you fall asleep just fine, but wake up too early. I can call it that if I want to.

What is too early though, is different by person. My dad is also naturally an early riser. He tells me my grandma would say he’s a bird—he naturally liked to sleep early and wake up earlier. Even when I was little, I read a book that said good little boys and girls go to sleep at 8pm, so I told myself, “oh, I didn’t know that,” and started to put myself to bed by myself at 8pm. My parents were shocked that I would just get up, brush my teeth, and put myself to sleep, all by myself.

Maybe, all along, I’ve been an early riser, who just didn’t want to accept that. Honestly, my body does start to get tired around 10pm, if I listen to it, I feel great when I wake up at 6am. If I don’t sleep at 10pm, I do feel a bit more tired at 6am, but it’s teaching me a lesson to listen to my body, and be okay with being me. I just need to sleep earlier. My body said so. That’s who I am.

Chronic illness teaches us to listen to our bodies. Our bodies are here for a variety of reasons, but one is to teach us things about ourselves. In our western lives, the mind and thought are valued so much, there is little emphasis on the importance of the human body, except for how it looks. As a human, did you know you’re supposed to be able to feel your body? Emotions, bumps, cold, hot, pain, the sensation in your fingers, everything. Even your intuition is a kind of feeling, not a thought, so to access it, you need to reconnect to your body. The body is important. Having a body and listening to it is an important part of being human that we have nearly lost. 

The less you can feel your body when it needs your attention, the more it clamors for you. That’s why, strangely, exposing yourself to extreme cold in the form of cold plunging can benefit your mental health. Get in the water, and your mind will say “Ah! Cold! Cold! Cold! Ah! Ah! Why! Why!” very quickly. You will soon realize resistance is futile, and in that acceptance, the body, allowed to feel the cold, will actually show you what it is capable of. It’s cold but not that cold. It will show you that you are more resilient than you think. Ugh, those darned thoughts, they get you everytime, why do they—shh. Quiet. As you feel your body in the cold, your mind will quiet. Your body will do what it is supposed to. In feeling, you realize it is not that cold, but the fear made it colder. You adjust. Maybe you get bored. Some people even get comfortable in there. Once I saw a guy on Instagram who exclusively made content on eating food while cold plunging. 

Feeling your body during cold plunging will help you reassociate with it during, but also will help you re-associate in general with your body, especially the more you do it.  

In reassociating with your body—in remembering you have one instead of overly associating with your thoughts—you learn to accept things makes them less scary, just like the cold. You learn that is what your body is supposed to do—feel things. It was designed for that. Don’t be scared. Don’t resist. Let it do its job. You will find as you experience feeling in your body, that like the cold, emotions are not that scary after all. It was the thoughts that made the fear, and the fear made the cold, just like that day with the tea kettle. That’s why powering through when your body feels bad is counterintuitive. 

Powering through tells your body it doesn’t matter, while it is trying to tell you that it’s a part of you too. It’s trying to tell you that if you can let it do its job—to feel things—you’ll feel better! If you’re so disconnected with your body because of your overattachment to your thoughts, you forget that not all of your thoughts are real, and that your body is, but once you acknowledge it’s existence, things can start to get better! 

The insomnia comes and goes, or does not exist at all, depending on the words I attach to it and what I think of it. It gave me so many things. The raw emotion I felt each day in my exhaustion, helped me process not just my divorce but my whole life. I could not avoid how I felt inside of me any longer. I cried all the time. It felt good to cry, to be raw enough to find and express the emotion. In the middle of all the breakthroughs it gave me, I had my spiritual awakening, which forever altered my life.

The tinnitus, while present and still teaching me lessons, I believe will remain until I figure out how to acknowledge what it is trying to teach me in full. Western doctors have told me it is permanent, but I know the volume and tone has gone down significantly over time, so it is possible to heal. Maybe I will love the lessons it gave me the same way I love what insomnia gave me.

I have a new chronic condition that is making me a bit nervous, and maybe we were right at 28, that a chronic condition is what lets you know you’re old. Maybe. If that is the case, I am not sure how to make sense of chronic conditions that did indeed go away. Even the TMJ I had briefly, which I was told by doctors would never go away and may need botox to manage it or surgery, did indeed go away. I like to believe the body has more abilities to repair than we give it credit for in western belief, and I am starting to learn about this, but it makes sense that the body may or may not be able to repair itself depending on how you feel. Do you process your emotions, or avoid them in fear while storing them in your body?

Last year, my teeth started to shift—damn me for not wearing my retainers like every orthodontist says you should. There was some degradation to my gums due to the new positioning, so my dentist thought it was critical I get aligners. The aligners aligned my teeth, but destroyed my gums even more. Talking to a representative from the company that made them, he told me, “I’ve never seen that before.” 

It turns out, there’s not a ton you can do for gingivitis, and if it continues it can lead to many things including tooth loss. I am only 39, so as you can imagine, I am concerned. My dentist showed me a new, slower, gentler, one directional way to brush my teeth to help preserve my gums, which I don’t like and have been doing diligently since then. Sometimes with chronic illness, we can definitely feel disappointed. We think, “if only that never happened, I wouldn’t have to deal with all this.” That is a thought and a feeling I definitely understand.

But to not accept is futile, and stress and anxiety tend to worsen any condition. That’s what western medicine, in its arrogant limitations, doesn’t understand. I am working on accepting what happened to my gums, but more so, I am working on accepting and feeling that I am disappointed about it. Once I lean into that feeling enough for it to be acknowledged, I know I can move into more positive emotions about it, like hope and optimism, and those can improve the condition by itself, while also encouraging me to seek out alternative methods that do not believe gingivitis is permanent. 

I don’t know what happened to Bethy’s knee in the end. I followed her life unfolding on Instagram for many years. She eventually finished her multi-year backpacking trip and made it back to Australia, met a nice guy, settled down, and had kids. I sincerely hope she is not going the rest of her life dealing with knee pain. Health issues are one of the most depressing things, because while avoidable many times, once present, they sort of put a gray cloud over the rest of your life if you are not careful. It can be hard to enjoy things you used to, no matter how small, when you have a bad knee or haven’t slept in two years.

My ankle doesn’t hurt so much these days, and really I have been exercising and doing physical therapy, so actually my body is better than ever. One of the things that I think happens as you get older, is you realize you have to befriend your body. See what it needs and take care of it, preventively and reactively. The body has rights on you—this is a belief in my religion. But, the body is also a source of joy. It allows you to run, jump, play, sing, hug. It’s great having a body! Just think of what it would be like if you didn’t have one—you couldn’t be human! We need to appreciate and accept our bodies more, not just how they look, but how they feel.

The older I get, the more I realize, I actually love taking care of my body. Maybe it’ll sound silly, but drinking water, running, processing my emotions, accepting how I feel, lifting weights—sometimes these are the best things about my day. I love the idea that I am doing something for me, taking care of me, tending to the temple that is me, and honoring the queen I am. That is genuinely how I feel when I take care of myself, like a queen. 

And maybe, that is the entire point of chronic illness—to learn to accept your body as it is. To learn to accept your emotions as they are. To learn to accept who you are. 

Maybe the ultimate goal is not just to learn to accept, but learn to appreciate and love. To learn to appreciate and love who you are, mind and body.