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The hardest part of living with Lyme disease for me has always been the lack of concrete “knowns� and how much they tend to morph and blur over the years, with the medical community and public perception and even within my own body. To pinpoint this disease, to define it, in and of itself is something of a labor already.
And the deal with so many chronic illnesses is that most people won’t want to believe you. They will tell you that you look great, that it might be in your head only, that it is likely stress, that everything will be okay. None of these are the right things to say to someone whose entire existence is a fairly consistent torture of the body and mind. They say it because they are well-intentioned usually, because they wish you the best, but they also say it because you make them uncomfortable. Your existence is evidence of death, and no one needs to keep seeing that—especially not the people who
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I could not believe I was breaking down again. But losing writing was the worst of it all somehow. I could not form sentences, my imagination seemed crippled, plot and characters seemed so abstract, theme an impossibility, all syntax and diction just puzzles that were unthinkable to piece together.
The nebulous symptoms plus the fracturing of articulacy and cognitive fog can cause any Lyme patient to simply appear mentally ill and mentally ill only. This is why we hear that young women—again, anecdotally—are dying of Lyme the fastest. This is also why we hear that chronic illness is a woman’s burden. Women simply aren’t allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too, and then it is by some miracle or accident that the two can be separated for proper diagnosis. In the end, every Lyme patient has some psychiatric diagnosis, too, if anything because of the hell it takes
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How could my body erupt in a chaos of spirochetes each time my mind and body suffers? How does that work? And yet we continue to find evidence of the mind and body connection.
