The tires of my road bike have been slowly deflating for the last three years. Leaned against the gilded radiator of my urban apartment, it has collected dust, taunting me—the artifact of a life I can’t easily remember. I have contemplated in equal measure: inflating the tires to build up the facade of activity, selling it on marketplace in a lucrative admission of defeat, and riding it. The last has been easily dismissed. 

When I graduated from college I remember the intense feeling of freedom to build my life from the ground up. I was single, with a decently-paying job, in a brand new city. I could be and do almost anything—now liberated from the clutches of academic drudgery—and I wanted to be one of those people who hiked. I wanted that sun kissed glow, and the wind-swept hair. I wanted to tell people at work about my outdoor adventures. I wanted to be a person who cycles, and mountain bikes, and kayaks, and skis.  

Mostly, I was successful. I hiked on almost every day off, cycled twenty miles at a time, was given a mountain bike that I quickly muddied, skied every night after work and all day on the weekends. In the summer, I sailed competitively and ran through my neighborhood. I was muscled and strong. I felt beautiful and mighty and brave.

And then I got sick. 

What would later be surgically diagnosed as endometriosis caused almost unendurable cramping for one week out of every month, my occasionally dormant IBS raged, and gastroparesis, which took a full year to diagnose, stole my ability to eat. 

I didn’t accept that I was sick until I lost fourteen pounds in a month and ended up admitted for several days at the Cleveland Clinic. I would lose even more weight before the end of 2019, and wouldn’t gain any of that weight back for over a year. All of the muscle that I had worked to build melted off of me. My pants didn’t fit and my t-shirts hid my protruding ribs and collarbone. The curves of my back and hips vanished and I stopped feeling sexy. 

It’s difficult to describe the weakness and fatigue of a long or chronic illness to people who haven’t felt or seen it. It’s difficult to explain how taking a shower uses a full day’s energy, or how stairs make your heart pound violently, or how badly you want to sit down all. The. Time. In my months out of work, I napped twice a day like an infant. When I finally went back to work, I settled into a rhythm of eating dinner and falling fast asleep on the couch by seven. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have something left at the end of the day. 

At one point, swimming through the shape-shifting grief of living in a broken body, I wrote this in my journal: 

I’m grieving that I’m not strong anymore. I used to hike and mountain bike and ski and road bike. Miles and miles. My body was amazing. And now it just struggles, and I’m sad that I didn’t get to enjoy her strength for longer.

Even when my health started to improve, I didn’t in my deepest hopes believe that I would ever be truly strong again. I’ve been back to work for eighteen months, but as recently as a few weeks ago I was weeping over the difficulty of sailing, even still. I’m so much better, but the chronic and unpredictable nature of my diagnoses won’t be fully remedied this side of heaven. 

And even still, my body, like yours, is amazing. It’s healing. Flowering back into strength. Over such a long time and somehow all at once, I want to move my body again. Today I went for a run. I WENT FOR A RUN. And last week I hiked the Niagara Gorge with a friend. And I’ve been doing yoga after work again because I need help winding down. I literally forgot that I had ever had trouble coming down from the heightened state of work. 

And I feel like I get to build my life all over again—in the best possible way. 

I’m alive. I can eat. I can run. I can go to new places without fear of pain. I can advocate for my body when it needs help. And I can remember, with acuity, what it was to live with all of those things in question. Sometimes you get a second chance that feels so sweet you want to suck the joy right out of it. That’s me—dancing into these days of being alive. Every pain free moment, every bite of food, every walk around the block a brand new lease on life.

Ansley Kelly

Ansley Kelly (’16) makes her home in Rochester, NY, where she delights in short, sweet summers spent sailing and long winters spent skiing at her favorite mountain. Between outdoor adventures, you can find her buying books more quickly than she can read them and indulging in mid-morning naps. She works for Wegmans Food Markets where she finds purpose and joy in feeding her community and the wider world.