I am an undeservedly healthy person and I very rarely have anything resembling a proper illness. Yet I’m constantly complaining to anyone who will listen about any slight sniffle, headache, or minor ailment. The fact I keep doing this to people who have actually had significant illnesses is a mortifying reflection on my own sense of entitlement. And it shames me.

So - Public Accountability! I am going to stop complaining, or comparing, or making bids for attention based on health. There are people (a good proportion of my newsfeed) who are properly ill in all manner of visible and invisible ways and my complaining is only obscuring them.

This isn’t only external - I also intend to stop telling myself that I’m ill when I’m clearly and demonstratively fine. I feel like there is a part of me that’s constantly trying to reclassify any input I have into evidence of illness and build a narrative around it of ‘ill person.’ I get a nice kick of mental energy from that narrative even when that input is much better explained by ‘I have recently been outside, and I didn’t have much sleep last night.’ To be clear, there’s NO sense in which I think I’m making it up - but there is a sense where I’m looking for trouble and making it self-fulfilling. So I’m stopping that as well. That’s: stop acting like I’m ill - even to myself.

I’m inspired in this by Nova - they threw up this morning in an incredibly casual way and went on playing happily (once changed and cleaned, obviously) without any of the rampant overacting that I would have in the circumstances.

First caveat: I am so aware that you have to be incredibly privileged to entertain this as an idea. I’m putting it up because I really think it will work better done publicly and because the more honest something is, the better I find it works.

Second caveat: this is only about me. There is nobody I’m looking at and thinking ‘you JUST need to change your attitude,’ least of all any of the ill people I’ve seen/spoken to recently. Very much NOT about you (actually, that’s NOT true, you may well be one of the people who have made me think ‘You know, I’m going to stop moaning about my issues because you have it much worse’).