"You don't look sick" I've lost count how many times I've heard that over the years. It's not a compliment when someones says those words to you. Those words I find so funstrating to hear as I wish I could hand over a box of all my invisible suffering and it makes it hard for your suffering and trying to have your ill health taken seriously.
"Looking well" takes a heck of a lot of effort and it can be a burden to seem "okay" to the outside well and it's almost something you have to do because you have to live out your life through your suffering. If you spent your days acting out your internal sickness you would never get anywhere.
Often care professionals don't take your symptoms, like pain, seriously because you've become so accustomed to masking and living with them. Even when I've been rushed into A&E with something like a badly dislocated hip internally I'm shouting/screaming/crying, but I've learnt that that get's me nowhere, so I quietly and subtly deal with the pain and she I'm asked how I'd score my pain I'm not believed because I'm not shouting or screaming or crying.
People around you question you, why are you not "trying hard enough" or "pushing yourself" to get a job (or some other part of adulating) because you "look" capable of working. When in fact they only see me, which is briefly, is when I'm having a "well" moment because I've rested and recharged and tried my hared to summon my "functioning human" mode to meet that person. And then when they leave I can go back to my usual position of being curled up in a ball on the sofa too tied to lift my head ill mode externalising what my body s screaming about internally.
And even though I'm a pacifist when people tell me "you don't look sick" or "you need to try harder" what you really what to do is punch them.
It's okay to not feel okay. And if you want to get upset or angry then go for it!
There is no stereotypically "ill person" - 19% so almost 1 on 5 working aged people in the UK are disabled (Scope) and the vast majority of those people's disability will be largely invisible. Each person's disability is unique to them; even two people with the same illness will not have the same difficulties as one another.
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