I Thought My Life Was Over at Twenty-Nine

I was twenty-nine when I was diagnosed. Which meant I spent a period of time being ill at an age when the people around me were not thinking about being ill at all. There is a particular loneliness to that. The gap between your reality and the reality visible in your social feed.

I did not talk about it much for the first several months. Not because I was ashamed, exactly, but because I did not know how to make it land in a conversation without it becoming the whole conversation. I was still figuring out how to carry it myself.

I am thirty-one now. Two years out. I am not going to tell you it all resolved neatly because it has not. I still have follow-up appointments that I approach with a particular quality of dread. I still have moments of something I can only describe as low-level grief for the version of my late twenties I did not get.

But I am also still here. Still going. Still building the life I was building before, just differently. That counts. I am sure of that now even on the days it does not feel like it.