How to Withstand the Personal Narrative Critic
On blogging in the thick of crab mentality.
“So your passion is writing about yourself? 🤣”
I hesitated to start a blog, anticipating belittling comments like this one.
My friends and family have been pushing me to write about my experiences for years throughout my chronic illness journey. In the early years, I was too brain-fogged and fatigued to string a single sentence together, let alone organize the mess of thoughts, experiences, lessons, and resources I encountered and collected along the way. I reassured my friends and family that the writing would come one day, likely in a flood. But not yet. I had to heal to the point of being able to organize my thoughts first.
The energy and brain fog were improving long before I dared write, though. Because aside from those reasons, I also didn’t want my identity to center around my illness or to magnify what was already so consuming by focusing on it even more. I told my friends and family over and over that wrapping my entire identity around the label of chronically ill would more likely keep me mired in that identity than help me escape it. So no to writing about it or social media accounts about it.
I clung to those excuses until I realized they were primarily excuses. It took one…
