There are some days when I can do my thing and be in the world and walk around, and it's fine. And then there are other days where it's totally not fine, and I want to crawl into a hole and die. And it's the most invasive and worst.
When you cry out in pain from a broken wrist, no one questions it. You just go to the hospital and take the necessary steps. Mental illness is just as real, even if it can't be seen.
My twenties were a write-off. It's a cruel illness, because you can't see it and you can hide it so well.
Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.
You wouldn't know I was sick unless you knew I was sick.
There are a few genetic traits that make people feel sorry for you, and there are some, like narcolepsy, at which people take personal offense unless you tell them in advance.
She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.
It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand, you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and worst of all you know that you are not just stupid.
[With depression] you get a real sense of shame, because your friends go, 'Oh come on, show me the lump, show me the x-rays,' and of course you've got nothing to show.
The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.
The only reason I ever shared my health journey with the world was because I felt it to be my duty to sufferers that are bed-ridden and dying because there has yet to be found a proper diagnostic test for Lyme Disease in this country.
We who suffer from chronic Lyme can only ask for our loved ones to try to understand and be compassionate about this invisible disease.
We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.
People are surprised that I can walk and talk.
When you have mental illness you don't have a plaster or a cast or a crutch, that let everyone know that you have the illness, so people expect the same of you as from anyone else and when you are different they give you a hard time and they think you're being difficult or they think you're being a pain in the ass and they're horrible to you. You spend your life in Ireland trying to hide that you have a mental illness.
You have to hide what you are and it's really stressful and very bad for your self esteem. Because it's not obvious to people that you are ill, they treat you as if you're a pain in the ass, then you beat yourself up and you are already beating yourself up as a part of mental illness.
Friends and family were convinced I was functioning just fine because I was efficient, productive and successful - who wouldn't be working twenty hour days? I had everybody fooled with my illness.
Lyme has brought me to my knees; this disease is a silent killer and does not have a face.
I know of people who don't believe it, but depression is an illness, but unlike, say, a broken leg, you don't know when it'll get better.
In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
There is very little magic in the world of the chronically ill.
My manic depression was ravaging my life, but because nobody could see it, many people thought it was a figment of my imagination.
