Yesterday morning began with a fall in the most unexpected way. I woke up as my body hit the floor.

Apparently, I had rolled too close to the edge of the bed in my sleep. I only woke up because of the pain of the impact. As a disabled woman living with chronic illness and pain, I know that an unexpected fall or injury can trigger a flare of epic proportions. Just like that, the day I had planned was gone.

My day got smaller. I spent most of it in bed with Tylenol and ice packs. Geographically, I was limited to one room. Still, from my phone, I wrote a blog essay, managed my social media content, and applied for grant funding that could accelerate the growth of Midwest Mimi. The day looked nothing like I had planned, and it still held purpose.

When people say disability is “cool now,” they make chronic illness sound like a lifestyle trend. I understand why that idea hurts. There is nothing trendy about pain, fatigue, medical appointments, cancelled plans, lost income, or waking up unsure what your body will allow you to do. What has changed is our visibility. Disabled people can speak openly and find one another in ways previous generations often could not.

For most of history, being too sick to leave home could also mean being cut off from much of the world. Access to education, employment, friendship, creativity, information, and public life depended heavily on the ability to physically get somewhere. Isolation was built into the experience.

We still have a long way to go. Disabled people continue to face inaccessible buildings, transportation barriers, inadequate healthcare, employment discrimination, poverty, and benefit systems that punish them for trying to improve their circumstances. We should never stop working toward a world in which more people can participate fully and safely. Even so, if I had to choose a time in history to be disabled, I would choose now. This is the most accessible version of the world we have built so far.

The phone that allowed me to keep working from bed also connects me to people through calls, FaceTime, social media, group discussions, and individual messages. Recently, another 45-year-old woman commented on my essay, “I Am Not Less Autistic Because I Learned How to Live.” She had been diagnosed only weeks before her birthday. She said my words brought tears to her eyes because it felt as though she could have written them herself. A woman I had never met found part of her own life in something I created from mine. Some days I need that kind of recognition. Other days, I get to provide it.

That matters because the vast majority of people who were in my life before chronic illness have not remained. Illness changes schedules, energy, finances, interests, and how reliably someone can show up. Some relationships do not survive those changes. Losing them can make you question whether people valued who you were or only the version of you who could participate in life the way they expected.

Finding people who still value me and what I can give the world has been incredibly important. It is lonely to feel as though you have no purpose, and it is difficult to remain hopeful when your life has narrowed to survival.

Before I had diagnoses, I spent years very sick without understanding what was happening inside my body. There were months when I barely left my bed and was rarely awake except when I had to be. I had difficulty separating dreams from reality. I did not know whether any of it would pass, improve, or continue getting worse.

Eventually, it culminated in respiratory failure.

Those were some of my darkest days. I had very little left in me beyond the work of staying alive. Survival was what I could do then, and it was enough, even when it did not feel like a life.

Now I have reached a place where I can create and write again, and the internet gives those things somewhere to go. My ideas do not have to stay inside my house just because my body often does. Midwest Mimi gives me a way to make meaning from what I have lived through. I can help another person feel understood, share useful information, make somebody laugh on a terrible day, and contribute to conversations happening far beyond my immediate surroundings.

Having those avenues available to me has restored a sense of purpose to my life. Purpose gives me something to anticipate, and that gives me hope.

I am careful when I talk about hope and mental health because women with chronic illness are so often told that our physical symptoms come from anxiety, stress, or something happening “in our heads.” My physical conditions exist regardless of my attitude toward them. Positive thinking did not diagnose me or heal my body.

During my sickest years, uncertainty, loneliness, grief, and the loss of purpose added emotional suffering to a body that was already struggling. Connection cannot remove the illness. It can make the life surrounding it more livable. Hope makes being physically ill more survivable. Being heard, valued, and needed changes what it feels like to wake up and face another day.

Technology cannot remove all the barriers disabled people face or restore every relationship that illness changes. It gives us ways to participate that were unavailable to generations before us. Disabled people have always been here. More of us can now speak publicly, find community, and contribute from the bodies and circumstances we have today, without having to physically enter every room where life is happening.

Technology did not cure my chronic illness. It gave me a life beyond surviving it. After years when survival was all I had, that life feels extraordinary.