What Chronic Illness Taught Me About Strength

Strength doesn’t always look like endurance. Sometimes it looks like adaptation.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jenn Labin.

Some mornings I do everything right and still wake up feeling terrible. It can be so easy to fall into bitterness, self-pity, and isolation when you’re managing life with chronic health challenges. I have literally a dozen different diagnoses that show up with symptoms like migraines, exhaustion, joint pain, muscle pain, brain fog, poor sleep. . . I’m tired just trying to capture it all.

The kicker is that someone like me can do everything they’re supposed to do to manage their health and still feel like garbage. Every day I drink 100oz of fluids, eat gluten-free, meditate, stretch, track exertion to manage my energy, and take medication seven times daily. But today I woke up to a wicked headache and debilitating pain. For no reason.

We can only work on five projects maximum at any given time; managing chronic health conditions counts as at least one project. In my case, I am still trying to get to root causes and effective treatment plans with my care team, so I have to count my health as two project slots. My hope is that I will get to a point in 3-6 months where it only counts as one project. When two of your five available projects are devoted to simply staying functional, it changes what productivity has to look like.

All of this means that no matter how hard I try, I can’t rely on having a 40-hour work week. (Or, as a business owner, a 60-hour work week.) At the moment, there are weeks when I’m lucky to get 10 solid hours of focus time. It’s probably not surprising that I’ve often thought that there’s no way I can make my business work given my current reality.

And yet, despite all of this, something in me refuses to quit my practice as a women’s coach. The thought makes me angry. This is my dream. I’m good at it. My clients experience real transformation. This work gives me meaning and purpose. I will make this work. To do that, I have to reach for my strengths.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying that I will be strong and push through challenges. I have most certainly employed that strategy — many times in fact. Charging forward and ignoring my health has only ended in escalating symptoms, extreme burnout, and hospital visits. No, the way forward is not to ignore everything else and “try harder.”

Accessing strengths means finding other ways to accomplish what’s important. Strengths are what allow us to go over, under, or around the challenges to reach our goals.

Strengths-work is something that I focus on with my clients. To be honest, though, it usually takes a while for individuals to get comfortable acknowledging their strengths and finding ways to tap into them. However, once they do, it’s often a game changer.

Some of my top strengths include reframing, learning & curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. To keep things moving for my practice, I’ve tapped into those strengths in the following ways:

• Reframing: Perhaps the most essential step was to reassess what “success” really meant for me. Sure, I’d love to work with a certain number of coaching clients and participants in my other services, but that isn’t what I need right now to truly feel successful. Reframing my goals has completely changed my perspective on my business.

• Learning & curiosity: Instead of feeling shame and guilt about what I’m not doing, I’ve spent time intentionally expanding my core skill set and exploring the brilliance that others in my community are sharing with the world. At first, it felt irresponsible to prioritize exploration over ‘real work.’ But, I very quickly found myself inspired and motivated to get to work.

• Creativity: One of the most frequent compliments I receive is that I think about things differently from most people. (At least, I take it as a compliment.) So, it’s very easy for me to access this strength to redesign my coaching content and engagements to work better for me and still provide tons of value for my clients.

• Collaboration: I don’t have very much of a battery for social events, but I do get more of a charge when I’m interacting with people on topics that are interesting to me. I now approach connection with built-in flexibility and zero shame around rescheduling. That small shift has made collaboration energizing instead of draining.

What I’m learning is that strength doesn’t always look like endurance. Sometimes it looks like adaptation. Sometimes it looks like resting before the crash, redefining success, asking for help, or creating new systems that honor the reality of your body instead of fighting against it.

Living with chronic illness has forced me to become more intentional about where my energy goes and how I measure progress. It has also reminded me that our value is not determined by productivity, output, or how much we can push through pain. The truth is, many of us are carrying invisible challenges while still trying to build meaningful lives and pursue work that matters deeply to us.

I don’t have this all figured out. There are still hard days when grief, frustration, and fear show up loudly. But I’m beginning to trust that I can build a sustainable path forward by leaning into my strengths instead of waging war against my limitations. Not because it’s easy, and not because positivity magically fixes chronic illness, but because creativity, curiosity, collaboration, and reframing help me stay connected to possibility.

I suppose that’s my real goal — not getting back to the person I used to be, but becoming someone who honors both my purpose and my needs.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. — Audre Lord, Poet, Writer, and Civil Rights Activist

Jenn has turned her hyperfocus to understanding the ADHD brain. And, as a caregiver to many others with AuDHD, OCD, ODD, etc. She is on a mission to help women and girls burn bright with their strengths. You can find out more about Jenn at rocketbraincoaching.com.