“I’m in my forties, yet when I climb the stairs to our bedroom each night my knees creak as if I’m walking on the hardwood floors in my parents’ nearly-hundred-year-old house. I have a disabled parking placard in the car, something my dad didn’t qualify for until he was seventy-five. Acquaintances may tell me I look fine, but I don’t feel fine. I feel worn-out and weary.

“It’s hard to know which parts of my life are impacted by natural aging and which parts have been impacted by my autoimmune disease. Is my lack of energy and lack of flexibility a result of my body simply not being twenty-one anymore? Or have all these changes somehow been sped up, as if I’m rolling along downhill, the brakes have gone out, and not only can’t I stop, I can’t even slow it down?

“I don’t know. I’ll never know. Because there’s no way to separate the naturally-aging me from the chronic patient me.”

I’m pleased to share that the paragraphs above are an excerpt from my recently published essay “Prime Time or Off-Peak? LIfe with Chronic Illness at Midlife.” You can click here to be re-directed to Midstory Magazine to read the essay in its entirety.

(By the way, long-time readers may recognize this essay. It had been published on a different site quite some time ago. That site is no longer active, which is why I chose to lightly edit and re-submit the essay.)