I’ve been toing and froing for a while now about writing this particular blog post, but after last week’s article about losing my blogging mojo (which you can find here) I feel it is important to speak about one of the issues surrounding why this was the case.

As I explained before I lost my blogging motivation for a while due to a number of things coming at me all at once (I am glad to say at this moment in time I have started to get it back!), but one of those triggers for me was the land of social media.

From one chronically ill person to another – you do realise being chronically ill doesn’t make your exempt from being kind right? This is a snapshot of a tweet I posted back in August after having someone on social media be nasty about a piece I had written for something outside of my blog. A piece I wrote a few years ago before my blog started, that had been re-shared by somewhere else, whereby I spoke about my very personal chronic illness journey. Normally something like this wouldn’t bother me, we all have opinions right and we are all entitled to them, but on this particular day I had been to hospital and received a health update which I was trying to digest, jumping on to social media for some gentle relief. It was here I stumbled upon to the words of someone who didn’t like the article I had written, and the comment they left was horrible to say the least. No feedback or opinion of how they saw a situation differently, just pure nastiness. What made this worst was it was from somebody who has chronic illness.

Having someone living with chronic illness be the perpetrator as stupid as this sounds was more hurtful than it coming from an abled bodied person. Why? Because whilst an abled bodied/non-chronically ill person has no idea how it feels to be chronically ill – a chronically ill person does. We don’t live like for like lives even with identical conditions, nevertheless we can sympathise with the rocky roads we all face. It was at this point, I wondered why I was bothering, what was the point? My mental health was worth more, so I took a step back.

It would be easy to sit here and say, oh maybe that person was having a rough day and they were venting at the wrong person, but I had just had a rough day which was made worse by this random person. Because in the same way I don’t know what that person was going through, they didn’t know what I was either and that is the very point. When we choose to engage with posts on social media and want to vent or be short-tempered, we are only thinking about our own bodies and more importantly our own minds completely dismissing the person on the receiving end, and what their minds do as a result.

Being chronically ill doesn’t give us a free pass to be rude, nasty or aggressive to others – and it especially doesn’t give us the right to do it to others in the same boat.

I know a lot of people may read this and think, well don’t write things if you don’t want it criticised, or that I should develop a tougher skin. How about we all be kind instead, it’s not hard.

Social media can be such a positive outlet in the chronic illness community, but it can also be incredibly lonely. When people choose to blog or write articles or share their personal stories, they are giving a bit of themselves to show others in the community they are not alone in their thoughts and feelings which is a very brave thing to do. What people need to also remember is most people who do this use their time and precious energy to help others normally at no cost simply because they care. Do you have to agree with what someone has said? Absolutely not. Can you have a different idea or share something that works for you? Of course. Is there a way of doing this? Yes, it’s called being respectful.

Criticising people when they give tips that haven’t worked personally for you, or discrediting how someone describes how their illness makes them feel, even arguing with how someone has used the wrong terminology is something we should all be mindful of, because we are all different. We as chronically ill people need to understand that most of our experiences are not going to be carbon copies of each other – we are all living with different symptoms at different severities, with different living arrangements, with different families and different priorities.

I can only talk about my own personal experiences. Doesn’t make me right, but it doesn’t make me wrong either – it makes it mine, my body, my story and I am going to discuss it my way. I am not an expert on any of my conditions, nobody is, but I am an expert on myself.

If you don’t like what I or somebody else writes that is absolutely fine, but give us feedback and support, not hate. The point of the chronic illness community is to bring people up, not put them down, and we all have a role to play in making that happen.

Oh, and to the person who felt the need to be so nasty – I hope it went in some way to making you feel better about yourself, because after this post I sure do!

Now that my rant is out the way (phew!), my next blog post we are going back to something a bit more fun. On my social media (the dreaded social media) I asked people to name a song title that represents their life with chronic illness. I plan on sharing these next time with a few of my own – but if you would like to take part feel free to message me on Twitter or on the email in the contact tab.

Sarah xx