Time and time again

I’ve explained my disease exactly 47,146 times but there always seems to be at least one person who has yet to hear the story. Now, since I am at college, there are a several thousand more people who don’t know what I live with. Yet. They most assuredly will ask why I am wearing two wrist braces, or why I walk a little funny, or why I won’t flop onto a couch already full of people. Answers: they hurt, it hurts, it will hurt. That is my golden explanation.

I have definitely gotten more lazy with how I explain my disease, simply noting it as an autoimmune joint disease that causes swelling and pain all over my body. I no longer talk about how my body recognizes synovial fluid in the joints as dangerous and proceeds to attack them, or how I have to take a myriad of medicines and vitamins just to be able to get out of bed. I decided that people don’t care to hear about every little detail of my disease, and if they do then they will ask. One would think that it has become second nature to explain it, and to be honest it has. I could describe in detail the nature of my disease without even giving it a second thought—but that doesn’t mean I want to.  I get tired and bored of repeating myself over and over to a new face only to do it again fifteen minutes later.

My disease is a huge part of my life, and that is not something I have the power to change, but I don’t want it to be the thing that people remember about me. I don’t want to be known as “the girl with the disease” or “the girl in pain.” I can’t hide or hide from my disease, but there is so much more to me than a faulty immune system. People sit around here in leisure, munching on their sandwiches and drinking their coffee while they type away on their laptops about theoretical physics, or political ambition. I carefully bite into a carrot so as not to aggravate my jaw while typing about the toils of my life. I am different from the majority of people in this room, and I have no intention of letting all of them know exactly how. Right now, they see me as another student working on homework and eating my lunch, and that is exactly how I want it to remain. They see me—not a medical nightmare. In a way, meeting brand new people is relieving because they will only know what I tell them about me. And that is why I have cut my explanation of disease short. It’s just a thing I developed a couple years ago, not a catastrophic event. Since they have never heard of it, they won’t know any better anyway. Here I can be exactly who I say I am. A student. A Husky fan. A science fanatic. A cheese lover. A brown-haired, brown-eyed, 5’5” female. Here, I am not a disease embodied. I am exactly what I want to be.