You Don't Need a Cure to Be Whole

It took me nine years to believe that.

For almost a decade, I lived with my diagnosis like it was a secret I had to protect. Not because I was ashamed of the condition itself, but because I believed it stripped me of something essential.

I thought illness made me less credible. Less worthy. Less lovable.

I kept overcompensating. As if enough effort could make the diagnosis disappear.

It was a quiet, constant self-negotiation. And it nearly broke me.

The Lie I Lived

I believed self-love was conditional. That it belonged to the future version of me. The one who had figured it out. The one who was steady. Symptom-free. Strong.

But that version of me kept moving farther away, and I kept bending myself into smaller shapes trying to catch up.

I didn't feel unlovable because I was sick. I felt unlovable because I was hiding.

I was editing my experience in real-time: softening the hard days, minimizing the exhaustion, performing capability I didn't always have. I thought if I could just be palatable enough, manageable enough, inspiring enough, then maybe I could earn my place in the world.

Pretending to be fine when you’re not is its own kind of sickness. It hollows you out. And in that hollowing, something else slipped away: my compassion for others.

When you're drowning in self-loathing, when you're convinced your illness makes you less than, it becomes impossible to see clearly. Everyone else's struggles felt smaller than mine. Their complaints felt trivial. I had become so consumed with my own unworthiness that I couldn't hold space for anyone else's pain.

The Slow Unlearning

Healing didn't begin with a positive MRI. It began with fatigue, all-consuming sinking into your bones, both from illness, exacerbated by pretending.

I started to notice how much energy I was burning trying to appear untouched by my condition. How I held my tongue in conversations about health. How I braced my body against vulnerability.

I let myself stop performing. Stop posturing. Stop editing my experience for other people's comfort.

I started being nicer to myself in small ways. Like, instead of calling myself pathetic for needing a nap, I'd just... take the nap. Revolutionary stuff, I know.

I let it be messy. I stopped trying to turn my pain into something tidy.

I learned that being whole isn't about having no struggles. It's about accepting them. The willingness to show up for your life exactly as it is, not as you wish it were.

The real breakthrough was when I stopped believing I had to earn my way back to wholeness. That moment when I realized I didn't need to find a cure to be worthy of love, mine or anyone else's. I didn't need to raise my baseline or fix myself to deserve this peace.

I was already whole. I had always been whole.

This didn't just change how I saw myself, but it opened my heart again. When I stopped drowning in self-loathing, I could finally see other people's struggles clearly. I could hold space for their pain without measuring it against mine. My compassion, which had been buried under years of pain, came flooding back.

Here's what I know now

My condition is still here. So is uncertainty. So are hard days.

But I don’t see them as failures anymore. I don’t see myself as something that needs fixing,

I no longer withhold care from myself until I've earned it. I no longer wait to feel whole until I've done everything "right." I'm not waiting for a cure to reclaim my life.

I'm living it now.

Not in spite of my illness, but alongside it. With it. Inside the full complexity of it.

I'm learning I can feel awful and still be a whole person. Sounds obvious when I write it out, but it took me forever to get there.

These aren't contradictions. This is just being human.

This is what it means to stop apologizing for taking up space. To stop shrinking yourself to fit other people's comfort zones. To stop believing that your worth depends on your ability to hide your struggles.

When you stop hiding, something beautiful happens. You find your purpose inside your pain, not despite it. You discover that your struggles have given you gifts: deeper empathy, hard-won wisdom, unshakeable gratitude for what you do have. These aren't consolation prizes. They're what you get from walking (or rolling) through fire.

If You're Still Hiding

If you're performing wellness just to feel worthy, if you're afraid your truth might make you less visible, less respected -I get it.

You don't have to prove your strength by pretending you're not struggling. You don't have to be twice as good to earn your place. You don't have to wait until you're fixed to be fully alive.

You're not broken. You're not behind. You're not excluded from love.

You can show up exactly as you are: messy, figuring it out, whole.

Your symptoms don't disqualify you from joy. Your bad days don't cancel out your good ones. Your need for rest doesn't make you lazy. Your pain doesn't make you weak.

Your life isn't on pause. It's already unfolding. And you are already enough.

I'm supposed to say I've learned to love myself exactly as I am. And most days, sure. But last week I caught myself googling 'MS breakthrough 2025’ at 2am again, so clearly I'm still working on it.

You're here. Whether you're living with chronic illness, supporting someone who is, or just tired of pretending everything's fine when it's not -you're reading about this instead of looking away. That's actually a pretty big deal.

Especially when it's hard.

You don't need to be cured to be worthy. You don't need to raise your baseline to deserve love. You're already whole and not because you've overcome your struggles, but because you've learned to live fully with them. And in that living, I found what I never expected: I actually give a damn about people in ways I didn’t before. I can see what matters and what’s just noise. And somehow, I’m grateful for things that used to be invisible.

Written by Keith Peterson

This is the second in a series of Upside MS blogs exploring what it means to live fully with chronic illness. These posts are for anyone who is tired of pretending to be fine when they are not.