For a really, really long time, I hid who I was and what I was going through. I hoped that playing pretend could somehow just make it all go away. 

I loved playing pretend when I was little. In my mind, I could be anything I wanted – a school teacher, a broadway star, a scientist, a doctor. I would immerse myself in the roles as if they were my reality, creating whatever self and life I wanted that day. 

For a while, after I received my chronic illness diagnosis, I thought I could do the same. 

I thought that if I played pretend, if I pretended it wasn’t true, that I wasn’t chronically ill, then it would all go away. If I pretended to be someone I was not – if I tried hard enough – then, maybe, just maybe, the self and life I wanted would become my reality instead. 

The older, manifestation-like version of dress up, if you will. 

Except a chronic illness diagnosis doesn’t work that way. Sure, you can manifest the life of your dreams in other ways, but that doesn’t mean you can wish away being chronically ill. It doesn’t work. I tried.

At first, my diagnosis was a relief. I finally felt validated. I had been searching for answers for so long and no one knew what was wrong with me. I thought I could easily accept my diagnosis because it was an answer, a way to move forward. When I got to college, though, that’s when it became difficult for me to accept my diagnosis. In fact, for about two years, I basically pretended that it wasn’t there.

In the months after being given a chronic illness diagnosis and being told, “you have Crohn’s disease,” I thought of it like this: the more I ignored its existence, the more I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Now I know what people mean when they say hindsight is 20/20, because boy, was I wrong. In fact, the complete opposite happened. I had the belief that denying it all would be more freeing. In reality though, the more you try to suppress something rather than acknowledge and work through it, the more intensely and more continuously the feelings you’re trying to escape will show up. Then, the worse it gets. That’s exactly what happened to me. 

I would try to drink or eat or exercise the pain away. I would welcome people into my life whom I knew would never truly love me as a means to build this persona that was a facade to cover my heart. 

Eventually, it took spiraling down towards rock bottom to finally realize that acceptance is more freeing than denial ever was. I realized that acceptance held the door open towards self-love whereas denial kept it shut. 

I wish I could look back and say that there was one day, one instance, one stand-still moment in time when I looked at myself in the mirror and knew I had to come to terms with my chronic illness diagnosis, what it truly entailed, and what I had worked so hard to ignore. I wish I could remember a specific point when the denial became too much to bear and I immediately knew I had to face the truth. But, just like everything else in my life, and just like healing, that path was far from linear. In fact, the path was kind of one that is so rocky that you best be wearing a seatbelt and holding on for dear life. 

With time, age, the right people in my corner, and a whole lot of therapy and introspective soul-searching, that rocky path from denial to acceptance led me to discover that the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, the parts that we once tried so hard to keep hidden in the shadows, are actually the most liberating. The most powerful. The most life changing.  

The people I choose to surround myself with and the intimate, intense self-work I’ve done and continue to do have helped me to see myself in the light as a human who is lovable and worthy and deserving. I am not a burden who has to hide her pain and her truth. And neither are you. Not only does my family,  my friends, my therapist (of course), and my chronic illness community motivate me to be better, but they also inspire me to be more of who I am at my core. To accept myself, to own both my pain and my power, and to use it to help those who are still too scared to embrace who they are.   

If I told my younger self that she’d be talking about poop, bloating, mental health, and the ins and outs of colonoscopies for everyone to hear, I think she’d probably crawl into a hole and not want to come out. When I first started sharing my story and first started getting involved in advocacy work, I felt a dual sense of nervousness and freedom. Every time I would post something and reveal a part of myself that, for the longest time, I so desperately wanted to lock up and throw away, I would physically start shaking when I hit that share button or go run around the house in panic because I couldn’t believe I put it out there. I couldn’t believe I put myself, my true self, out there. Sometimes, I still can’t believe it.  

But, if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. And change only comes when you face the truth, not when you run from it. 

I’ve been there, and I can promise you this – hiding in the darkness of denial and playing pretend won’t make your problems go away. I learned the hard way. 

Trust me when I tell you that you don’t have to hide like I once did.