• Welcome to Phoenix Rising!

    Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.

    To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.

How Singer-Songwriter John Prine Helped Me Accept A Life of Illness

Pyrrhus

Senior Member
Messages
4,172
Location
U.S., Earth
A moving blog, worth a read:

How Singer-Songwriter John Prine Helped Me Accept A Life of Illness
by Matt Lazell-Fairman
https://m-lazell-fairman.medium.com...lped-me-accept-a-life-of-illness-718febc37884

Excerpt:
Matt Lazell-Fairman said:
Country folk singer John Prine wrote songs for the heartbroken. He died of COVID-19 a year ago and for the first time in years I tried again to explain what broke me. It’s not been easy to write because I am very ill and the subject is illness and illness is vast.

This essay is about what it means to be sick, not with the sort of illness that usually gets airplay, the sort that defines a part of your life in ways you ultimately learn to manage and work around, but with the sort that renders it utterly unrecognizable. We don’t make much space for narratives about this kind of illness. Perhaps because it’s less scary to think of illness as either treatable or terminal than it is to acknowledge that it sometimes leaves people horrifically disabled for the rest of their lives. Whatever the reason, we should make more space. Because it is terribly hard to learn how to be that sick when neither you nor those you rely on for support understand what it means to be so. Certainly it was for me.