Despite what you’ve been lead to believe, living a life with chronic illness doesn’t mean putting your dreams, goals, and ambitions on hold until your health improves. In fact, I have seen time and time again how the process of working towards your aspirations can support your well-being and actively soothe your symptoms. It’s what I call healing in action and as a Chronic Illness Coach, it’s my privilege to guide you on this journey of thriving with chronic illness.

So, why is it so important - and in fact beneficial - to pursue your dreams, not despite or regardless of your health condition, but by incorporating your chronic illness into your goals?

Psssst - this blog post was inspired by this podcast episode. You can listen to it here.

Seeing the value in chronic illness

I believe in seeing chronic illness as a valued part of our lives and who we are, contrary to the common narrative of struggle and hardship. I know, it’s not as simple as that - that’s why I have an entire podcast and programme, Your Chronic Illness Ally, dedicated to the subject. By reframing our perspective, by flipping the way we think about, talk about and experience chronic illness, we’re able to open ourselves to the idea and reality that working with our chronic illness (rather than fighting against it) leads to a more joyful, peaceful, healing, and fulfilled life.

Side note: It’s important to highlight that seeing the value in chronic illness doesn’t mean we become defined by it, it’s simply recognising it as you would any other part of you, from your personality to your dominant hand to your body composition.

Releasing yourself from the limitations of conditioning and status-quo

Struggling to connect with goals and ambitions, due to societal pressures, a lack of time/energy and enough headspace for self-reflection, isn’t a struggle reserved for those living with chronic illness. But when living with chronic illness, you also have to contend with the conditioning that says ‘because you’re a broken human, you need to fix yourself before you can achieve anything else in life’.

Klaxon, red alert; if you’ve been around here for a while, you know I take a hard pass on that BS.

I’ll shout this until the cows come home: you have the right to dream, aspire, and work towards your desires, with your chronic illness in tow.

Waiting for your chronic illness to improve before pursuing your dreams is a lie that’s sold by anyone who stands to make any money from that lie. I know, I sound like a massive conspiracy theorist, but please, take this as logic.

A large part of my work is building the foundations that allow you to feel safe and supported in breaking free from this conditioning, in breaking free from expectations (yes, there are expectations put on you by society about how you ‘should’ live with chronic illness) and in breaking free from any ‘rules’ that have come about as a result of those things.

These foundations allow you to figure out how you want to live with chronic illness. They allow you to ask yourself what thriving with chronic illness looks like in your mind, and feels like in your body.

The symbiosis between chronic illness and your dreams, desires and ambitions

Working towards your dreams, goals, and ambitions, in a way that’s aligned and chronic illness informed contributes to your overall wellbeing and helps soothe your chronic illness.

Note: I choose to say ‘soothe’ as I really want us all to move away from the notion of ‘healing’ chronic illness as the only goal that’s worthy in life.

In short: instead of viewing your dreams, desires and ambitions as separate from your chronic illness, you can utilise them as tools for healing, and you can use the wisdom communicated by your chronic illness to help you work out how you’re going to achieve them.

How cool is it that this mutually beneficial partnership allows you to experience joy, happiness, and fulfilment, whilst also supporting your health and nourishing our body and soul. Mega cool.

Lil caveat: It’s all too easy to slip into a pattern of doing things ‘only’ for the healing benefits. I very much remember a time when anything I did, ate, experienced had to have a link to healing, and it sucked the joy out of everything. Especially when I didn’t see it move the needle. It’s really important that you’re able to appreciate the things you do for joy, fun, creative expression, pleasure, etc, and see them as just that, rather than something you’re doing for healing or self-care.

Let’s redefine and reframe success…

Success gets to mean whatever you want it to mean. I saw a post the other day that said something like ‘I don’t want to be the multiple empty houses kinds of rich. I want to be the buy clothes from independent female owned business, live in an eco self-build and get to potter around my farm picking my own vegetables kind of rich’ and damn, it was so on point for me.

So, before we go any further, let’s remind ourselves that the dictionary definition of success is ‘the accomplishment of any aim or purpose’. You define your aims, you define your purpose, no one else.

Next, it’s time to think about how you’re going to go about that accomplishment piece. The common belief that success requires pushing ourselves outside our comfort zones, requiring us to constantly strive for more and better, requiring us to ignore, silence and push away our chronic illness is detrimental and quite frankly, nonsense.

It’s been proven by many people around the internet that this capitalist, patriarchal approach isn’t necessary. There are many, many, many alternative ways to pursue our goals and ambitions. In fact, I like to think that living with chronic illness is a big ol’ invitation to explore the vast landscape of alternative routes to success.

Working towards your dreams, goals and desires gets to be a gentle stretching of your comfort zone. No pushing required. That gentle stretching takes into account your chronic illness, the state of your nervous system and any other part of your ever changing body and life. It will look different on different days, and that’s more than OK.

Perhaps start asking yourself - what would it look like to gently stretch my comfort zone today?

Navigating the difference between fear and excitement; how do you know what’s a stretch and what’s a push?

So, how do you know whether you’re hard-pushing your comfort zone or gently stretching it?

The answer here is to be able to differentiate between fear and excitement.

Our emotional state varies depending on where we are in our chronic illness journey and cycle. Our nervous system can be greatly impacted by living with chronic illness (depending on how we’re experiencing it). Both of those things could cause us to think ‘woah, I can’t do anything when I’m feeling like this’. But actually, when we view the whole thing as a spectrum, we get to ask ourselves ‘how am I feeling today and what feels like a doable, nourishing step for me to take?’

In other words, we get to tweak our path and actions accordingly, remembering that this is healing in practice and whatever step we take gets to both soothe us and take us closer towards our goals.

Your body, nervous system and chronic illness provide you with suuuuper valuable information (see what I mean about chronic illness being a valuable part of us?) that can help you plot out your route to your newly defined version of success. A route that feels good, aligned, sustainable and completely achievable. A route that can be changed and approached differently, depending on how you’re feeling in any given moment.

So, take a pause to tune into whether your dream, goal or aspiration is filling you with fear or excitement (or landing somewhere on that scale). It’s a really good indicator as to whether that thing itself, in that moment, is aligned. It can also guide you to explore how your approach to that thing is landing in your body, too.

P.S. Something can feel both exciting and scary, and that’s OK. As long as it’s leaning towards excitement (or any other related feeling), you’re good to go!

P.P.S. On the other side of that coin, if your nervous system is in a constant state of fight/flight/freeze like it is with many people who have been in a long term flare, your body won’t know the difference between fear and excitement and it’s possible that both will trigger symptoms. This is something we look deeper into in YCIA but if this is the case, it’s about looking at all the rest, recovery and soothing of your NS as steps towards your dream/goal/ambition, not as seperate.

At all times, non judgemental curiosity and gifting yourself the freedom to experiment imperfectly is key. It allows you to maintain momentum in a way that nourishes your nervous system, soothes your chronic illness and helps you strike a balance between growth and self-care.

finding a purposeful life with chronic illness

Harnessing the Power of Chronic Illness

I’m really passionate about saying that our chronic illness can serve as a superpower in every part of our lives, whether that includes our dreams and ambitions, or in living the day-to-day. I know that can feel like a stretch to believe, but when we’re able to reframe the way chronic illness shows up in our life; when we’re able to tune into the wisdom and identify its gifts, we allow chronic illness to become our guide and informant, supporting our growth, healing, and helping us to move towards the vision of life we hold dear.

Thriving with chronic illness - or even living a life that you’re happy to call your own - isn’t about waiting for a perfect moment when your health improves. It’s not about creating a set of conditions which, upon reaching, you allow yourself to experience the good, joyful, exciting and fulfilling. It’s also not about ‘pushing through’ chronic illness and living life ‘despite’.

To me, it’s about embracing your dreams, goals, and ambitions alongside your chronic illness, in the present moment.

By reframing your perspective on chronic illness, aligning the steps towards your aspirations with your current circumstances (understanding that you get to take it one micro-step at a time), and nurturing a supportive environment and mindset, you can create a life that’s joyful, purposeful, and fulfilling, that includes you as your whole self.

So, what are your goals, dreams, and ambitions? It's time to embrace them and embark on a journey of thriving with chronic illness.

Living a purposeful life with chronic illness: the path less taken