Please note the following content warnings for this article: mentions of illness; mentions of vomiting; mentions of blood; mentions of death.

In our society, sickness is often viewed as a temporary thing.

Sickness Lite, or the kind that gets better, lasts for a few days or a couple weeks. Sometimes, several months if it’s a treatable cancer. When it ends, you move on with your life, and it becomes a fond anecdote. “Remember that time I was sick as a dog during finals week? Whoo-ee, did I down a lot of DayQuil!”

Sickness Extra, the other kind, starts at a minimum of several weeks, usually more. It ends when you expire, at which point your obituary is published and describes you as having “battled” with insert-mortal-illness-here. You are stamped “brave” and in death become an inspiration to people who aren’t in danger of dying for a long time.

Neither of these should be diminished in their own rights. Nevertheless, it must also be ignored that not all sick people either die or get better. For some, sickness is just a quality of life. Young, old, queer, straight, whether or not you were already ill.

I’m 23, and I’m sick.

I didn’t get sick in any particular way. I’ve always been, on and off, and with different ailments or levels of awareness thereof. The earliest illness I remember happened in second grade; I was relegated to a hospital for something like five days for a case of pneumonia. I remember coughing, and coughing, and coughing, and asking my mother, “Am I going to die?” I don’t remember what her answer was, or whether I believed her.

Nevertheless, I didn’t die. I was back after a short recovery and returned to elementary school with a tied stack of hand-drawn cards wishing me well. People whose names I did not recognize were offering condolences and hoping for my health. I wondered what my teacher had told them. How serious had it been? I couldn’t know since I was now better. Is anything really ‘serious’ that doesn’t funnel you straight to the grave?

In third grade, I switched to a different elementary school. I wrote a play about recycling, and my classmates performed it, with puppets. Terribly, my first yearbook photo in that class showed me in a fuzzy lavender sweater. It is the only picture day I distinctly remember, mostly because I later vomited all over my desk in Mr. Neil’s third grade class, defiling said sweater with remnants of sick. I didn’t wear it again.

For a while, I wasn’t a bad student — even if I did come to class day after day with circular neon Band-Aids signaling my forehead and chin, markers of a disorder I would later come to recognize as dermatillomania (compulsive skin picking), and even if I did regularly call in sick due to chronic UTIs. The “Perfect Attendance” award was never within my sights, but it was the only honor I didn’t win. Before they gave A through F letter grades, my report cards were littered with ‘O’s for ‘Outstanding,’ and rarely lacking a “Pleasure to have in class.” Outside of class, I explored creeks and picked blackberries I wouldn't eat, or wore down acorn caps on concrete blocks and strung them into bracelets.

But it didn’t last. I had to start taking regular medication by the time my age reached double digits. Because of my trouble swallowing pills, this meant scattering a capsule of soluble powder in plastic cups of cranberry juice, a habit which I quickly grew to disdain; this was mostly because I did not want to finish the entire cup of cranberry juice in order to get all of the medicine, something which my mother attributed to a picky eating stint entirely fueled by stubbornness. (Turned out it was actually fueled by Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. Add that one to the check-list.)

Unsurprisingly, my medical problems continued. A little more surprisingly, I actually got mostly better from the thing that I was initially being medicated for. Instead, in between sketching and writing and rereading battered Harry Potter books, I started throwing up again.

This time they said it was stress. I wasn’t sure when stress started happening, but looking back, I suspect it had something to do with the correlating advent of my Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, which transformed me from a straight-A student sans P.E. to a very smart disaster. I cut my own hair, started writing poetry, and got a lot of tests done to figure out what was wrong with me (to little avail). A non-invasive procedure helped assuage my recurrent UTI problem, but I would never regain my ‘good student’ standing. Instead, a depressive slump chasing the seventh grade resulted in connection with a good therapist.

This carried me into high school, where my first relationship partner prompted me to seek a diagnosis for ADHD, based on our late-night conversations, during which I jumped from topic to topic with the approximate ease of a flying squirrel gliding from tree to tree. I vacillated between interests with equal lucrativity; teaching and attending classes for both theatre and art, hosting on-campus campaigns for gender equality, attending protests, trying out speech & debate, and founding and leading my own creative writers club. Where other students might be harangued with the infrequent flu or cold, I would every so often stay home with debilitating nausea, usually returning to class the following day. It had stopped seeming unusual to me, and the rotation of doctors I met did not provide any answers. After being tested for mononucleosis due to fatigue, the perplexed technicians informed me that I did not appear to have the illness now, although antibodies present in my blood indicated I had suffered from it sometime previous, and it had somehow gone by unnoticed.

In summer school, where I made up the math course I had failed, the interim teacher nicknamed me ‘Turbo,’ for the speed with which I would plow through the in-class assignments. “What are you even doing in here?” I remember him joking. In his eyes, as in the eyes of my parents, with my brain, I should have been successful—but was not. I echoed this to the school’s academic counselor, to whom I was appealing for an Individualized Education Plan, or IEP; he pulled up my course progress reports, informed me that I was fine, if not exactly great, and that these services were reserved for “students who have real problems.”

I wondered what he considered a real problem, remembering how students stared at me in the computer lab while I worked on make-up classes through Cyber-High. I could feel them whispering with their eyes. I recall pretending it was where I belonged, and joining my low-performing friends after summer school for a 24-hour-filmmaking festival, where we won Audience Choice.

I went through relationships, and was proposed to three times. I wrote a college entrance essay about one of my various disorders and scored 2210 on the SATs, but forgot to finish submitting every part of most of my applications. The only two acceptances were both art schools in southern California, and I accepted the one closest to the coast. That was when I was seventeen.

In the next five years, I attended: the Art Institute, where I earned a triple diagnosis of depression, dermatillomania, and OCD; Santa Rosa Junior College, where I moved in with a lifelong best friend, got three jobs, and started medication for the first time; the UC Berkeley Extension program, where I completed exactly one online course for an editing/publishing certification, an aspiration that seemed more attainable in my situation than any job requiring a Bachelor’s; Cultural Experiences Abroad in Paris, a study abroad program accredited both in France and by the stateside University of New Haven, where I learned photography, taught English to a three-year-old French girl named Octavie, and came down with a devastating lung infection; Folsom Lake College, a local community school where I ran into an old high school suitor and which I learned had an incredibly unhelpful office of accommodation for disabled students; and finally, University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where I may finally, after seven years of collecting college credits, accumulate enough passing grades to complete a four-year degree.

Unfortunately, I am still sick.

In unfailing tradition of developing new health crises every 1-3 years, my gastrointestinal issues reared their ugly head again in the Spring of 2015. I’ve donated enough blood tests to feed a peckish vampire, undergone ultrasounds of my intestines, endured an absurdly unpleasant endoscopy, and been eyed in the waiting room of my gastroenterologist by confused elderly patients. My mysterious stomach illness has since been given an official name—Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome or CVS, also known as: “Mysterious Stomach Illness: The Diagnosis.” Naturally, once that was diagnosed, I was swept up in testing my hearing for an ever-frustrating struggle with auditory processing, which led to a much-belated confirmation of my inherited high frequency hearing loss (courtesy of my mother) and long overdue need for assistive hearing aids.

In the meantime I have continued to refine my daily drug cocktail, still seeking the right balance after dalliances with just about every pill, tablet, or capsule in-between A(dderall) and Z(oloft). I take cyproheptadine to suppress my nausea, gabapentin to help me sleep, and guanfacine both to boost my ADHD treatment and to lessen the alarming heart rate increases that resulted from other, stimulant meds.

I have also taught myself embroidery, participated in six different clubs, joined a professional fraternity, entered writing contests, increased my tattoo count by several, buzzed off all my hair, published poetry in the school literary magazine, helped build homecoming floats, decorated pumpkins, tasted my first legal drink, traveled to conferences, visited three different continents in the same half-year, spearheaded equality and diversity inclusivity campaigns with the campus administration, and firmly rooted myself in this community (amid multiple Withdrawals and Incompletes).

This Fall, my fifth semester at Pacific and the record-breaker of most total semesters at any single post-secondary institution ever, I started showing signs of a possible neurological condition. A leg twitch that started near the end of summer has since steadily increased, interfering with my concentration and productivity. My entourage of medical professionals—which thus far has included a dentist, primary care physician, therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, audiologist, and gastroenterologist—has expanded by one with the addition of a neurologist, and I spent the day before Thanksgiving in an MRI machine while a friend read her book in the waiting room outside. I do not know what is wrong with me yet; it could be as serious as MS, as mild as a manifestation of anxiety, or something in between, like epileptic seizures. I have since found myself wondering, early twenties and incomplete as I am, why the universe felt fit to punish me with yet another sickness when I have yet to get better from the countless previous ills.

But the truth is, I’m never getting better. Some things might go away: the CVS, the anxiety, the insomnia. Some things I know never will: the hearing loss, the ADHD and OCD, the disordered eating. Some things will get better or worse with time, riding up and down like a heartbeat measured on an electrocardiogram.

I know what some people want to ask of anyone with chronic illness, with a disability, with any condition that doesn’t go away. “What is it like, living like this? How do you go to school, work, live?” In all honesty, I don’t know. This is the only way I have ever lived. To have no obstacles to my success but the constraints of society and my own will is an unimaginable world to me; in my world, there will always be something pushing against me. In all these years with self-blame, bitterness, confusion, and regret, I have developed the strength to be at peace with the things that limit my capability. What drives me forward is the knowledge that there will always be something pushing me on, too.

Sometimes this is spite. Sometimes it is love. Often it is passion, idealism, even desperation for fulfillment. I no longer have the luxury of certain ambitions, but I impetuously continue to believe that I will go farther than where I am now. And I will be sick when I get there. And I will write, or perform, or create art, or teach, or research, or make some sort of difference. And I may not sleep enough, or eat well, or hear all frequencies, or win an award for Perfect Attendance. I may not ever get better. But so long as I am still here, I will be good enough for something, and I keep believing I will be okay.