Invisible illness week; what's my visible hope?

Invisible illness week; what's my visible hope?

This picture may look random on a lingerie site, but here is the story so far;

10 years ago I was on course to become a counselling psychologist and do the whole career/family/vaguely “normal” life thing. Then I got M.E/C.F.S.; you can read 30 things you might not know about that from last years Invisible Illness Awareness week.

In the slow implosion of my life that followed, I somehow managed to scrape through the post grad qualification before realising I couldn’t do a conventional job, and started KMD. I lost the partner, and the family option, and doing things I enjoy, keeping up with friends and loved ones as well as making a living? Really tricky. Engage survival mode.

This year for Invisible Illness Awareness Week, we are all posting a picture (hence visible) about our hopes.

This is me, on holiday in Stockholm, with friends, talking to other friends (I maintain that it was THEY that were lost!). Normal, right?

For me, to do something that normal, to make it that far away, to spend time swimming and walking and talking, that is AMAZING. And it gives me hope, reminds me, that though life isn’t turning out as I originally hoped, it can still be full of love and laughter and friends.

You lot have a huge amount to do with that; there is no way that someone like myself, too ill to do a 9-5 job, would be managing to get out and about this much without a fabulous community of committed, clever and thoughtful lingerie fans to somehow make this crazy website work!

I totally tested the heck out the Kitten Bikini while I was there, by the way. You can definitely go swimming in it up to at least a DD cup in a Swedish lake!