Chronic illness can create a strange divide: in our minds, we are still the same person, while the body forces us to live a completely different life.
This is what I call the three identities.
The first is the healthy identity. This is not necessarily just the person we were before illness. It is also the image we still hold of ourselves. Our wishes, abilities, interests, ambitions and plans. We may still see ourselves as an athlete, a parent, a successful professional, a traveller, or a person with countless possibilities ahead.
Then there is the illness identity. Not as a label for a person, but as the reality of the body.
Fatigue. Pain. Insomnia. Cancelled plans. Less work. Less socialising. Things we once did without thinking can suddenly demand an enormous amount of energy.
And this is where a painful conflict can arise.
I still recognise myself. But sometimes I do not recognise myself in the life my body is capable of.
That is why, in my view, the aim is not simply to ‘accept the illness identity’. Illness is not all that we are, and it does not have to become the centre of our personality.
The third identity takes shape somewhere between the two.
From the healthy identity, we try to preserve what matters to us: our values, wishes, interests, abilities and the parts of life in which we recognise ourselves. At the same time, we take the body's limitations into account instead of fighting every day against the fact that they exist.
We may no longer be able to do a particular job in the same way, but we can look for work that still uses our knowledge. We may no longer be able to do a certain sport, but we can find another form of movement that gives us some of the same feeling.
The third identity is therefore not a return to our former self.
Nor is it a surrender to illness.
It is the slow piecing together of a life in which both parts can exist: the person we are, and the body we live with today.