Balancing a New Career with a Chronic Illness: Part 1

Most of you probably don’t know, but I have multiple chronic illnesses. Despite the fact that I’ve lived with many of them for my entire life, I was only diagnosed in 2019, after becoming very ill with a deadly infection. Since then, my health has been a work in progress.

For a long time, I was unable to do daily activities that most people take for granted. I couldn’t grocery shop, cook, go to the bookstore, or take care of myself like I used to. Slowly, I’ve been able to reimagine a life where I can find joy, but it is certainly not the life I had dreamed of (but honestly, who’s living a life they fully anticipated?). During the process of launching my freelance editing career, many challenges have arisen because of my health, so I’d like to share some of those obstacles, along with my strategies for working through them.

While my health is stable, I sometimes have days where I can’t do much, if anything at all. I can’t work or even relax, so I typically end up feeling majorly unproductive. These days are not relaxing, or like a vacation. They usually entail me running back and forth between the bathroom and my bedroom for hours on end. For a long time, I struggled with feeling useless on these bad days.

So, what do I do now when I have a bad health day? I allow myself to rest mentally, even if my body is being physically taxed. After years of spending hours on end in mental anguish because I was being unproductive, I finally caught on to the fact that the stress I was causing myself was actually less productive than just letting my body recover at its own pace and worrying about being productive the next day. Now, when I find myself worrying during a bad day, I just keep repeating “Right now, I am lying in bed,” over and over until that is all I think about.

Next up is the struggle of balancing everyday life with work. While this is an issue that everyone faces, it can be uniquely challenging for those of us living with chronic illnesses because those tasks take more mental and physical effort than they do for a healthy person. One errand or doctor’s appointment might mean half of my day is gone, and that is a generous estimate.

My best tip for planning around this is to schedule things carefully and mindfully. If I know I have a doctor’s appointment, I won’t schedule anything else that day. I try to limit appointments or taxing errands to once or twice a week because I know I will be too physically exhausted to do much more than that while also getting work done. When I do have a lot to do in one day, I plan my work around it if I can. If not, I will try to schedule time for a short nap in the evening, so I can work that night.

Stay tuned for part 2!