“The hardest person to convince I was disabled was myself.”
📖 A Quick Note Before We Begin
For years, I shared the polished pieces of surviving chronic illness.
I wrote about survival, resilience, and hope.
But there were parts of the story I wasn’t yet ready to tell.
Now, I’m sharing the reality behind them. 🖤
This is my reintroduction.
The raw version.
The honest version.
Because healing has taught me that vulnerability is just another form of courage.
🎶 Soundtrack of the Day
As I sit here writing this diary entry, “Show Yourself” from Disney’s Frozen II keeps playing in my head. After years of minimizing my symptoms and questioning my own experiences, perhaps my body has been asking me to show myself—to myself—all along.
I recently came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks:
“The hardest person to convince I was disabled was myself.”
Y’all… if that doesn’t hit home, I don’t know what will.
Honestly, I felt personally attacked by that quote. Apparently, the internet woke up and chose violence that day.
💭 Learning Not to Doubt Myself
I spent years minimizing my symptoms.
Telling myself I just needed more rest, more motivation, or simply needed to push harder.
I convinced myself that if I just tried harder, things would eventually get better.
Accepting that my chronic illness had become a disability wasn’t easy. It felt like giving something up, when in reality, it was finally acknowledging the truth.
Sometimes, self-acceptance is the hardest diagnosis of all.
For much of my life, I explained away symptoms that should have concerned me.
I blamed stress.
I blamed getting older.
I blamed being overweight.
I blamed working too much.
To be fair, twenty-five years in property management may have contributed to some of the exhaustion. But as it turns out, no amount of coffee fixes autoimmune disease. Trust me, I conducted extensive research.
Anything but the possibility that my body was genuinely struggling.
Even after being diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, I still found ways to minimize what I was experiencing. Then Myasthenia Gravis entered the picture, and once again, I found myself negotiating with reality.
“You’re just tired.”
“Everyone gets short of breath sometimes.”
“You’re overreacting.”
Spoiler alert: I was not, in fact, overreacting. My immune system was simply out here freelancing without supervision.
Looking back, I realize I had become incredibly skilled at gaslighting myself.
I often find myself asking:
How can I ask others to accept that I have invisible illnesses when I haven’t fully accepted them myself?
That question stopped me in my tracks.
Because I have learned that acceptance begins within.
Somewhere along the way, minimizing my symptoms became more than a coping mechanism—it became part of how I survived.
🌻 When Strength Becomes a Survival Strategy
Eventually, strength stopped being something I occasionally needed and became part of my identity.
I was the strong one.
The dependable one.
The person who figured things out, showed up, and kept moving forward regardless of what was happening behind the scenes.
For years, my unspoken motto became:
Just me and my dysfunctional body against the world.
And by dysfunctional body, I mean a body that apparently never received the memo about teamwork.
Admitting that I could no longer simply push through felt foreign.
If I’m being honest, it felt terrifying.
Because if I wasn’t the strong one, then who was I?
For a long time, I thought accepting my limitations meant surrendering.
It didn’t.
It meant being honest about what my body could and couldn’t do.
It meant trading guilt for grace and unrealistic expectations for self-compassion.
Acceptance isn’t quitting.
Sometimes, it’s the first step toward living better within the reality of chronic illness.
What I have since learned is that strength and vulnerability are not opposites.
True strength sometimes looks like acknowledging limitations.
It looks like saying:
“I can’t do this today.”
It looks like allowing yourself to grieve the life you thought you would have while still embracing the life you do have.
💜 Believing Myself
The biggest lesson chronic illness has taught me is that I do not need to earn my suffering.
I do not need to justify my limitations.
I do not need to wait until I completely fall apart before honoring what my body is telling me.
My symptoms were real long before I accepted them.
My disability existed long before I acknowledged it.
The only thing that changed was that I finally started believing myself.
My body knew something was wrong long before my stubbornness was willing to acknowledge it.
In hindsight, my body and I probably should have scheduled a staff meeting years ago.
Looking back, I spent far too long fighting my body to ever stop and ask what it was trying to tell me.
What might have changed if I had finally listened?
I may never know the answer to that question.
But I do know this:
Once I finally started listening, everything changed.
✨ Final Thoughts
Perhaps one of the greatest acts of self-compassion is learning to trust your own experience.
To believe your body when it tells you something is wrong.
To stop measuring your struggles against someone else’s.
And to recognize that your challenges are valid simply because you are living them.
If you are struggling to accept your own reality, please know you are not alone.
Learning to believe ourselves may be one of the hardest journeys we ever take.
Especially for those of us whose default coping mechanism is to ignore every warning sign until our bodies stage a full-scale rebellion.
But it is also one of the most freeing.
Maybe the real journey isn’t learning how to fight our bodies harder.
Maybe it’s learning how to finally listen.
💬 Let’s Talk About It
Have you ever found yourself minimizing your symptoms or questioning your own experiences?
At what point did you realize you needed to start believing yourself?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. 💜
Thank you for taking the time to read this entry from The Dual Diagnosis Diaries. If my story resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe, share, or leave a comment. Together, we can continue raising awareness, fostering understanding, and reminding one another that no one walks this journey alone.
Founder • Author • Advocate • Future Wellness Coach
Kia Lorice, The Dual Diagnosis Diaries 💜
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