painfully myself

 I’ve been told before my personality centres around my health. It’s a horrible fact told to me during breakups and loses of friendships. A warning of a statement. It tells me to quiet down, to suppress who i am. Because I am my health, and my health is suffering.

We are intertwined in a way that makes us forever inseparable. My personality is tied to my health in the way this condition is tied to my body. It’s permanent and unwavering. An overwhelming factor that affects every single aspect of my life.

Because Im in pain. And because of that I’m painfully myself in a way that able bodied people cannot experience. I am so horribly horrible in that my entire being centres around the most tragic part of my life…And that makes people uncomfortable. 

A discomfort that manifests itself in the form of comments, comments that ask me to stop complaining, to find something else about myself to talk about. But there is nothing else. There’s nothing else when my day to day is shadowed and all consumed by an unwavering fact. I’m ill. 

And that fact will follow me for the entirety of my life, and no matter how much i try to change and contort myself into something i’m not, to focus on finding an aspect of myself that will be enjoyable for others, the worse i get. I buckle under the pressure of wanting to be likeable. To be digestible to people that will not spend their lives in pain. 

No matter how much i paint myself to be someone i’m not, the paint will always chip away, exposing myself as who i really am. But inside i am also chipping away, despite how much i try to break myself down, to force myself into bite size pieces, easily digestible by those who are uncomfortable with disability. 

I cannot keep adding layers, my personality becomes bumpy, unsure strokes hastily covering the crumbling paint that once showed a portrait of a person that knew everything they wanted to be and had everything they dreamed of within reach. 

I do not know who i am outside of that persona i’ve created, but i know it’s fading, no matter how much i try to grasp at that enjoyable side of myself, it’s letting the ugly part show. The part of myself that is simply the shadow of a person, the remains of what once was, what i once could become.