Having a serious medical disorder isn’t always apparent to others because of how hard you must work to compensate for the symptoms and appear normal. They don’t see the private sufferings and painful episodes you hide from public eyes or know how hard it eventually becomes to hold both the symptoms and yourself all together. The more difficult it is to manage moving parts of a disease, the simpler it becomes to just decline invitations and offer creative reasons for why you stayed home. Your world gets smaller through clever excuses and normal is an all too formidable and lesser goal.The whole syndrome plays over and over, worsening for years on repeat until you, yourself, begin believing the lie that this is actually what spending your best life is supposed to be: a big inauthentic outward smile to mask the inward grimacing. It’s not living your best life.It’s just trying to appear to be living while you’re actually dying inside.