How sick is sick enough to ‘count’? To doctors? To friends and family? To other people in the chronic illness community?

How disabled do you have to get to consider yourself disabled? As a personal identifier? As officially recognized by the state or federal government?

At what point can you forgive yourself for the things you cannot do? What *are* the things you cannot do? What if you *could* do some of them, but you choose not to, because of the probable consequences in pain or the way you’d run out of energy or ability to do other equally necessary things later?

Sometimes it’s hard to be chronically ill, but at the same time, not ill ‘enough’. It’s hard to have an invisible illness, to have to ‘prove’ how bad things are–when you’re not busy covering up how bad things are because you want to have as normal a life as you can. Would it make more sense to spend the day in bed, with my unfinished work and my unmet responsibilities piling up around my blankets, an invisible tide fit to smother me when I drag myself back into the fray? Or shall I, as I so often do, take one step after another, ankles throbbing, tension ratcheting tight up the right side of my neck, headache descending, and just do the best I can to do as much as I can, and pain be damned?

To all of those caught in this snare beside me, betrayed by body or mind–I see you. Be kind to yourself. You have nothing to prove to me. You can choose to struggle forward, or you can choose to rest. Each is as valid as the other, and each has its place. Your pain is valid. Your struggle is real, even when it’s invisible, and even when it feels, all at once, like too much to carry and not enough to impress the right people. I’m impressed. I don’t need to hear your diagnosis, if you’ve even found one yet. I’m astonished by your strength, your determination, the way you take one more step, one more breath, amazed by the magnificent power of every beat of your heart.

You don’t need to reach some benchmark of sick ‘enough’ to deserve compassion, caring, or rest. You don’t need to prove a thing to call yourself disabled, or chronically ill, or whatever feels right for you in this moment. It is okay to choose to spend your energy however you think is right. Go ahead and say you can’t do something, if that’s what self-care looks like for you right now. It is nobody’s business but yours if it is something you could have done yesterday or might do tomorrow.

Remember this. You already deserve compassion. You already deserve care. You have nothing to prove.