Question:

I’ve had chronic fatigue for many years, and I feel like it’s affecting my relationships. What can I do?

Phillip Replies:

The first thing you might do is reflect on whether you’re letting the disease define you. The illness creates certain conditions that you have to accommodate, but it does not create your life. Most likely, you started doing everything you could to heal yourself long ago and will continue to do so. If you’re going to get better, you will get better. In the meantime, however, you may be denying yourself a much wider range of experience. Therefore, treat the chronic fatigue as a condition that characterizes your life but doesn’t define it. If you talk about it all the time with your friends, you may be limiting their ability to relate to you because they don’t need to hear about your illness again and again. You’re the one narrowing your life to be just the disease; the condition isn’t doing the narrowing.

You have an external life and an internal life. Although your external life may be limited, the quality of your internal life can be incredibly rich. So live with the intention to be fully alive under these circumstances. Reflect on the following statements and if they resonate with you then adopt them as your intentions to live by:

• I’m going to be wise in the application of my external energy because I understand there’s a limited quantity and I don’t know when it’s going to show up.

• In my internal life I have a wider range of possibilities for living fully, and I’m going to cultivate them.

• I will bring that cultivation of the internal to the external experience so I internally know the external experience.