The Struggles of Chronic Illness as a Young Person

I cried last night because I couldn’t stay awake. It was the third day of this and it was getting worse. I could not stay awake for more than four hours and could barely function in those brief periods of being awake.

Thankfully, when I was awoken at three-thirty this morning, the horror of the past few days seems to have passed. But there’s always something.

I am eighteen and have a lot of ailments that make life hard. They make it exhausting and painful and hard. Some are diagnosed, some are suspected. Unfortunately, symptoms don’t go away simply because you haven’t gotten a diagnosis yet.

My family, my healthcare providers, and I are all fairly certain I have fibromyalgia. The last few days were most likely a flare of CFS related to fibro. CFS here being chronic fatigue syndrome, not the country fire service. I suspect this because what I experienced was near textbook severe CFS. I could barely leave my bed. I fell asleep on the floor after kneeling down to scratch my dog’s adorable head.

Fibromyalgia and CFS have no set in stone treatment or cure. They make life torture sometimes and it’s times like last night where it feels like I will never get to have a life. Not only do I feel useless within myself, but there’s also this constant feeling of not being good enough of other people judging me. I know that I shouldn’t care but I do.

Even when my body lets me do things, my brain doesn’t. Anxiety, depression, PTSD, agoraphobia, ADHD, ASD; My brain is neurodivergent malfunctioning soup.

There are no resources for people my age. Most resources on the things I struggle with either address exclusively parents and their young children or middle-aged people. I’m glad those resources are there for those people but, damn, I wish there was shit out there for people like me because we need to know that life is possible.

I have aspirations. I’m going after them with everything I’ve got but I worry that everything I’ve got isn't anywhere near enough to reach my goals.

This is the life of a chronically ill disabled teenager.