The ICI Experience:

Speak no evil , originally uploaded by starshine_diva . This is the best article I've seen yet on invisible disabilities. It's titled " 'But You Look So Good!' and 7 Other Things NOT to Say to a Person With a Non-Visible Disability " and it's from " DiversityInc Magazine: Diversity and the Bottom Line" . Imagine that. Something good from the bowels of corporate America. Forgive my attitude. It'll probably get better a few more years down the road from my experience with that government job where they threw me away because I had one disability too many. Government, corporate, they're all the same, right? OK, back to the good-- The kicker is the last section. It took me a minute to get it, what the 5 second difference meant, and it's so true . Here's the last section: This Means You If you think this won't be a concern until old age, take note: 75 percent of people with chronic conditions are younger than 65. One...

Especially good if you live with chronic illness, I think. When I couldn't hold a book up to read it, not even a paperback, my therapist suggested that I join the Library for the Blind and Disabled. That was a wake up call. First time I really thought of myself as disabled. That was in 2001; I was first diagnosed in 1989. For all you unbelievers out there--you know who you are--I continued to fully function for 12 YEARS after the original diagnoses, and I can assure you I actually had the illnesses for many years before the diagnoses. But I digress. The Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled is for--you know. There are local branches all over the place. Call your local library to find out where yours is. So, the preceding paragraph was for the purpose of relating the following paragraph to the point of this blog--invisible chronic illness. I'm researching for my stint as host of the Invisible Chronic Illness Week (ICIW) Conference on "Blogging About Yo...

This is a history of my blog/journal attempts prior to this one. I started out at http://sherrillynn.greatestjournal.com/, as a record of the process I was going through in applying for Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) in 2004. Then I was able to start working and the journal laid unused for a couple of years. I worked part time in 2004-2005, then got a full time job in July of 2005. This summer of 2006 I was terminated from the full time job which I really liked, because I was sick with invisible (or concealed) chronic illnesses. Then I decided my blog should be a record of the claim I was filing on the discrimination of my employer on the basis of my disability. Then I (quite wisely) decided it probably wasn't too good to be posting stuff about my discrimination claim against my former employer, while the investigation was going on. Now the blog is about what happened, what's happening, and how I deal with it. I'm trying to channel my feelings into som...