When it comes to chronic illness, it’s very easy to get so lost in symptom management that you lose sight of your emotional life. Figuring out your new lifestyle is a massive undertaking and doesn’t give you a lot of space to think, and act, and feel, simultaneously. You often have to forgo examining your feelings in order to figure out how to get the pain under control, and you put those difficult emotions on the shelf while you do the work of figuring out what’s happening with your body. Many times, those hard-to-describe emotions . . . are anger. Anger over the excellent health you may never enjoy again, anger over the misdiagnoses, dismissive attitudes within the medical profession, anger over the people who simply don’t understand what you’re going through.
So you do the doctor visits, buy the medicine and supplements, try adjusting your routine. You do a few things, figure out what’s working, then revise as needed. You do this for weeks and months, and hope that you’ll finally figure out a recipe for wellness that you can sustain over the long term. And while you do all of that . . . the anger sits.
And trust, that’s all the anger does. It sits, and it doesn’t budge an inch. It waits for you while you run around and try to put out the fires with your health condition. It doesn’t go anywhere until it’s processed. So, it stands by as you try to do everything you need to get your health back on track.
When you finally get things under control, or when you just accept what your life will be with your chronic condition, then the anger bubbles up. The lucky ones of us have a few times where the anger explodes, gets processed quickly, and it’s on to the next thing. But for some of us. . . it doesn’t happen like that. It may not feel like white-hot rage initially. It may feel like discomfort, being a little less patient with yourself and others, a repressed or otherwise forgotten memory reappearing and knocking the wind out of you. It doesn’t always look or sound like anger, that is, until you start peeling back the layers.
After you inquire within yourself, “Is this sadness? Disappointment? Frustration? Fear?” and find that none of those emotions fit, then (if you’re honest with yourself) it’ll hit you. You’re mad. Furious, even. Mad at your body for not responding to your medication, improved diet or modified routine. Enraged at the many doctor visits that didn’t get you an answer despite you always telling them your laundry list of symptoms. Fury over how little your family, friends, or acquaintances believe or understand your discomfort. And yes, white hot rage over the insurance systems, employers and government frameworks that make it more advantageous for you to suffer and expire than to get real help on your path.
Your anger may not appear at the beginning of your journey. It may appear in retrospect, like mine did. And it’s still just as holy, justified, and worth acknowledging as it was when you first felt it but didn’t realize what it was.
Give your anger space, and give yourself grace for feeling it. It is part of your journey, and it deserves space. And then, when the rage has cooled down, care for yourself, and press forward. Your improved health is on the other side of your process.
