STILL HERE

The first decision I make each morning is whether to look in the mirror.

Some mornings, angry red plaques have spread across my face before I've even brushed my hair. On those days, I keep my eyes lowered as I walk into the bathroom. If I don't look too closely, maybe I can pretend I am still the girl I remember.

Next come my hands.

My fingertips are dark and calloused from years of checking my blood sugar. They look decades older than the rest of me, as though illness has signed its name across them. I tug the sleeves of my sweatshirt over them anyway. Maybe no one will notice.

Then I stand in front of my closet, searching for the shirt that hides the swelling from colitis. By the time I leave for school, I have already spent an hour trying to disappear.

My body has been changing for as long as I can remember. At six, I underwent brain surgery. At seven, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Then came psoriasis. Colitis. Lupus. Every time I learn the rules of my body, I discover they’ve been quietly rewritten.

People think chronic illness is measured by hospital visits, medications, or lab results.

It isn't.

It is measured by mirrors avoided. By sleeves pulled over scarred fingertips. By excuses rehearsed before anyone asks.

I'm sorry I'm late.

I'm sorry I'm tired.

I'm sorry my body changed the plan.

Eventually, apologizing becomes another symptom.

Every night, while most families sleep, my mom wakes again and again to make sure my blood sugar hasn't fallen too low. The sound of her alarm slips into my dreams so often that I barely notice it anymore. By morning, we are both exhausted, but school begins, homework waits, and life asks us to keep moving. For years, I believed these

illnesses belonged only to me. I didn’t realize they were quietly transforming my family, too.

The hardest transformations, though, never appear in my medical chart.

One afternoon, I sat in English class pretending to finish an assignment while the girls beside me planned a birthday trip. They argued over restaurants, laughed about outfits, and decided who would ride with whom. My name never entered the conversation.

I was close enough to hear every word.

Far enough away to realize I no longer belonged.

For a long time, I think my greatest fear was another diagnosis.

Then, during junior year, I read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Like most people, I expected a story about a man who woke up as an insect.

Instead, I found a story about what happens when the world begins to see only the shell.

Gregor never stopped being himself. He was still a son. Still a brother. Still someone who loved music. His body changed, but the person inside did not.

Suddenly, I understood something I could never before explain.

My greatest fear has never been pain.

It has never been hospitals.

It has never even been another diagnosis.

My greatest fear is disappearing while still being alive.

Lupus gives that fear a name: brain fog.

I've always trusted my mind more than my body. Books have always felt like home. Stories are the place where I recognize myself most clearly. I fill notebook after notebook because writing reminds me who I am. Some days I wonder what will happen if illness reaches even that part of me. I fear becoming someone I no longer recognize. I

fear that people will see only diagnoses where there was once a daughter, a reader, a writer, a violinist.

Then I think about Gregor listening to Grete play the violin.

Everyone else saw an insect.

Gregor heard beauty.

He was still Gregor.

I think about my own violin.

Every Saturday, I place it beneath my chin and draw the bow across the strings. Blood sugar numbers fade into the background. Medication schedules disappear. Even my hands—the ones I spend so much time hiding—become simply hands making music. The same thing happens when I write or disappear into a book. For a little while, I stop measuring myself by symptoms. I remember that I am larger than the body I happen to live in.

I still don't know what my body will ask of me tomorrow. Another flare. Another medication. Another diagnosis. Chronic illness has taught me not to make promises about the future.

It has taught me something else, though.

Identity is more stubborn than illness.

Bodies transform.

Scars multiply.

Friendships shift.

The mirror tells a different story every morning.

But beneath every diagnosis, every scar, every fear, I am still the girl who loses herself in books, fills notebooks with stories, and closes her eyes when she plays the violin.

Perhaps that is the quiet miracle—that transformation has never succeeded in taking the truest parts of me.

I am still here.

STILL HERE