A Decade of Disease
There was a quote that was making the rounds on tumblr when I was 18 that is probably still circling among teens now –– although maybe on tik tok? About what your twenties are supposed to be like.
Your 20s are your ‘selfish’ years. It’s a decade to immerse yourself in every single thing possible. Be selfish with your time, and all the aspects of you. Tinker with shit, travel, explore, love a lot, love a little, and never touch the ground.
Kyoko Escamilla
The eighteen year-old me reading that quote had, just nine months ago, been handed a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease. The year was 2010, Taylor Swift had just released Speak Now, every Thursday was “Jersday,” and it was still cool to own a lot of Victoria’s Secret PINK sweatpants. I wasn’t cool, but I desperately wanted to be, and I was in a new place where no one knew the former.
The Crohn’s Disease was an afterthought, a small hindrance to the cool-new-me I’d be in college, and nothing I was going to talk about, let alone cope with. Having a serious, sometimes debilitating, incurable chronic illness didn’t vibe with the adult years that tumblr and tv and that Escamilla quote told me I should be having. I should be fun, I should be reckless, and I should be all things sick was not –– young, vibrant, full of life and energy. I looked my mortality, the frailty of the body I was actually living in, in the eye and scoffed. That wasn’t going to be my life.
And it wasn’t, for a while. For some time I got to have the carefree college experience the universe had promised me. I joined a sorority, locked down an ill-advised boyfriend, and went out a lot –– all while maintaining good grades, because I am still a type A monster at heart. But then the panic started.
If you asked me before age 18 if I was depressed, the answer would have been a resounding no. I believed it existed, and I had friends who were afflicted, but that wasn’t me. I was sad and angry sometimes, for tangible reasons like my parents’ divorce or a boy who invited me to a dance only to spend the entire night talking to another girl –– but clinical depression or anxiety were not on my radar, and mental health wasn’t something often discussed in my family or my small town.
Fast forward to age 19, when the panic attacks were coming daily. I’d scream. I’d cry. I’d lock myself in bathrooms and plunge my fists into the unbreakable walls of the tub. I’d thrash around on my bed, trying to exorcise the bad feelings from my body by force. I’d feel certain I was dying, and I’d tell my boyfriend to call an ambulance. I’d skip classes, call in sick to my on-campus job, and fail to leave my apartment for days, sometimes weeks. My friends at the time thought I’d disappeared because I was just really into my boyfriend, because that’s what I let them believe. In reality, I was drowning and I didn’t know why.
After months of fighting it, I finally went to therapy. It was there that my therapist, a nice young woman who reminded me of an old teacher, was the first person to figure out what waters I was drowning in. She was the first one to point out that maybe, just maybe, my denial about being sick forever wasn’t actually working all that well. My brain, on some level, was screaming YOU’RE A SICK PERSON NOW, and in my efforts to push that voice down and suffocate it, I had made myself quite severely mentally ill.
I don’t go back to that time often, but I thought the tenth anniversary of my diagnosis with this illness was a good time to reflect on the self that now seems so young and in need of help in hindsight. I want to sit her down and tell her that coping with this disease, while difficult, isn’t half as difficult as what you’re doing to yourself in trying to push those emotions away. Even if the physical symptoms of your disease don’t come around to punish you, your brain chemistry will.
So now –– it’s been ten years. I’ve been through the gamut with this damn disease. I’ve lost and gained weight, friends, and my sense of self. I’ve cried, I’ve made inappropriate jokes, and I’ve met people who understood why I did both. I’ve been to endless hours of therapy, realized anti-depressants are my friend, and cycled through a variety of treatments for my physical symptoms. I try my best to be the person I needed when I was 18 to young girls I meet who are dealing with a diagnosis. I leave the house now. I appreciate things more. I’m not afraid to speak up. I’m not grateful for what I’ve been through, but I’m working on being less angry at the universe and less angry at my body.
With a decade in the rearview, I maybe didn’t live up to what I felt my twenties were supposed to be like –– although I have two more years if I really want to like, go through an EDM phase. My illnesses, both physical and the resulting mental, have kept me from some things. I couldn’t backpack through the Great White North or camp out for Coachella like my healthy, carefree counterparts. But I like to believe I’ve made my bildungsroman years something beautiful in their own right. Years where I learned how to be sick, how to be well, and how to balance both of those seemingly oppositional states of being within one young girl who is starting to be okay with how it’s all turning out.
So –– we’re stuck together, Crohn’s. Here’s to being 18, to being 28, and to learning to be okay.
