Invisible chronic illnesses have a strange quality: they can profoundly alter a person's life without those changes being visible at all.
If I were to make life with an invisible chronic illness visible and give it a physical form, I would draw it as a labyrinth.
When you first find yourself in it, you do not know its paths. You do not know what awaits you beyond the next turn, where the dead ends are, or which obstacles you will have to overcome. You try, you turn back, sometimes you fall, and slowly you begin to find your way through a space you did not choose.
But there is something else about chronic illness: Labirint does not necessarily have an exit.
That does not mean improvement is impossible. Symptoms can change, treatment can help, and life can be quite different over time. But it does mean that the goal is not to wait for the day the illness disappears before beginning to live again.
Over time, we can come to know Labirint better.
We begin to recognise its paths, our own limits and its dead ends. We learn what helps us and what exhausts us time and again. We walk through some parts more than once, understanding them a little differently each time.
I call them Corridors.
The seven Corridors describe different experiences of living with an invisible chronic illness: what happens to our sense of time, our identity and our relationships; how illness affects those close to us; how we find our way within healthcare and other systems; how we explain to others something they cannot see.
The Corridors are not stages that we have to complete in a particular order. We can be in several at once. We return to some of them. Some are barely noticeable at certain times; others take up all the space.
Nor is it my task to promise you a way out of Labirint.
But I can walk alongside you for a while. I can help you understand where you are, name what is happening to you, recognise the obstacles, and look for ways to move more easily through each Corridor.
Because life with an invisible chronic illness may not have a simple exit.
But we can learn not to feel lost in it all the time.
ENTER THE 7 CORRIDORS →