You Don’t Know What’s Wrong with Me| Coping with life-altering events and chronic illness support.

Imagine how exhausting it would be to keep explaining yourself to people who have already decided they know what’s wrong with you.

You have to prove that you’re tired enough. Explain why you can’t concentrate. Convince someone that you’re trying. Justify why something that looks simple isn’t simple for you.

You have to defend yourself against someone else’s interpretation of what you’re going through, even though they have no idea what it actually takes for you to get through the day.

This isn’t just about chronic illness. It’s also about living with a disability or any condition that affects your daily life in ways other people may not be able to see. It’s about what happens when people make assumptions about what you can do, what you should be able to do, and what they think your struggles mean.

Sometimes, it isn’t just people who don’t know you. It’s the people closest to you. The people who know what we live with, who we think understand because they’ve heard us explain it before and experienced some of it with us. Somehow, they seem to forget that what we deal with doesn’t just disappear because we don’t talk about it or because they can’t see it.

The people who care about us can sometimes lose patience with what we’re dealing with. And honestly, I don’t blame them, because I lose patience with myself too. But this leaves me feeling broken and isolated, as though I’m doing something wrong and letting them down.

I’m trying to get on with my life. I’m trying not to make every day about my health, every conversation about my symptoms, or every decision about what I can and can’t do. I want to think about other things. I want to enjoy what I can. I want to be more than the things I’m dealing with.

But then something happens. Someone makes an assumption, and there I am again, having to bring it all back into the conversation. I find myself explaining it all over again, explaining why something isn’t that simple, when all I was trying to do was live my life.

Just because I’m trying to move forward doesn’t mean what I’m dealing with has gone away. And just because I’m not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s no longer there.

When Assumptions Become Judgments

Here’s what I keep coming back to: How much of what we believe about other people is based on what we actually know—and how much is based on what we’ve decided must be true?

Someone forgets something, and we assume they’re not paying attention. Someone struggles to get a task started, and we call them lazy. Someone has trouble concentrating, and we decide they aren’t trying hard enough.We see the behavior. We assign a motive. We supply an explanation. And often, we never consider that we might be wrong.

Experiencing something occasionally doesn’t mean you understand what it’s like when it becomes a daily struggle. When something affects your everyday life, ordinary things can look very different from the outside. What we see as procrastination may be a struggle with focus, what we interpret as a lack of motivation may be something else entirely and what looks like negativity may be someone dealing with a reality we know nothing about.

I’m not suggesting that every forgotten appointment, unfinished task, or difficult day has some hidden explanation. None of us gets everything right, and we’re all responsible for our actions. I’m talking about the certainty with which we sometimes assign motives to other people. The ease with which we turn “I don’t understand” into “I know what’s wrong with you.”

We don’t have to understand someone’s experience to recognize that we may not have the whole story. We can’t see the whole of another person’s life. We don’t know what happened before we walked into the room, what they’re dealing with when they go home, or what it costs them to do the things others take for granted and we certainly can’t assume that because we’ve experienced something similar, we understand what it means for them.

Everyone gets tired sometimes. Everyone forgets things. Everyone feels anxious. That’s true. But sometimes and every day are not the same thing. Recognizing that difference is only part of it. The other part is accepting that we don’t always know what we’re looking at.

Understanding someone’s struggles doesn’t mean excusing their behavior. It means not assuming you know the reason behind it.

Most people who are struggling work hard to fit in with society’s expectations. They’re constantly monitoring themselves and adapting to what the world expects of them. But what if society made those expectations more flexible? What if we stopped expecting everyone to function in exactly the same way and made more room for the reality that not everyone can?

What if it became normal for someone to need a minute, to take a break without having to explain why, to say no without being made to feel guilty, or to do things a little differently without being judged?

So the next time you’re tempted to decide that someone is lazy, making excuses, not trying hard enough, or simply needs to change their attitude, stop for a moment. Not to make excuses for them. Not to pretend you understand. Just to consider the possibility that your explanation might be wrong.

Because what you see is only what you see.

It isn’t the whole story.

Coping with life-altering events and chronic illness support.