Letting Go With Chronic Illness Doesn’t Mean Giving Up

Letting go with chronic illness doesn’t mean giving up! [Updated April 1, 2026]

Looking back at this article from early 2018, I can see this was more than an article about chronic illness. It was the beginning of a profound unraveling. At the time, I thought I was learning how to let go of a life I could no longer physically sustain. What I didn’t yet understand was that I was also beginning to let go of relationships, roles, and expectations that could not sustain me.

Back then, I believed my illness made me a burden. I shaped my life around taking up less space, asking for less, and needing less. Today, I understand I was never the burden. The real weight came from carrying everything alone.

Letting go didn’t end my life—it gave me the space to rebuild it. This time, on terms that honour my body, my limits, and my worth.

No one prepares you for the losses experienced with illness. How do you heal from losing it all?

In early 2017, I realized I was in trouble with my health. Yes, I knew we were embarking on a new journey with me being chronically ill, but it took me a while to realize just how much our lives were going to change.

It was time to learn how to simplify life with chronic illness as my body could no longer sustain the pace I had been living.

But letting go with chronic illness doesn’t mean giving up!

I had to learn to accept what I need and what I didn’t need to realize that growth comes from making room for new things.

Most of my readers that have stuck with me since My Several Worlds first launched in early 2007 have watched me take journey after journey. The whole point of this site was to write about the several different worlds I live in: Canada (my homeland), the USA (John’s homeland), Taiwan (our adopted homeland), and China.

Soon enough this site had to be expanded to include another journey – the journey of being chronically ill abroad.

I’ve traveled to countless countries and laid down roots in Asia. I traveled the world with longing to see and learn about new cultures and people.

In 2009, I learned I had Ankylosing Spondylitis.

No one prepared me for what was coming. I had no idea how nasty this disease is! As the hospital appointments continued to increase and my pain and suffering worsened, the stress of keeping up with our business, our lives, and the things we used to love to do together started to take a toll.

We stopped traveling. We stopped going out.

I dug down deep and held on to life as I fell further and further down the rabbit hole, getting sicker and sicker with an incurable disease that is unstoppable.

I’ve achieved remission twice since 2009. The last times I achieved remission were in July 2014 and February 2019. I came out of remission again in July 2021 and have not achieved it since. My grasp on stability is tenuous and my diseases are wreaking havoc with every aspect of my life.

Since coming out of remission in 2021, it was the end of life as I knew it.

You might be interested in reading

• The Great Inflammatory Arthritis Flare of 2022
• My Ankylosing Spondylitis Story
• How Life Lessons Prepare Us For Life With Arthritis
• Living Within The Limitations of Fibromyalgia
• MECFS – I Am One of the Millions Missing
• 8 Ways Chronic Pain Changes You

Goodbye to my old life. I simply can’t do it anymore.

By 2015, I knew I’d be struggling to stay out of a wheelchair. I was right and finally decided to buy one in 2017. We also made two trips home in 2015 to see our families. I knew what was coming. Deep in my heart, I could see the changes unfolding like new leaves on a tree in the springtime.

I’m so glad I had the foresight to do that because I’ve relied on my wheelchair way more than I thought I would.

Now it’s 2023 and that wheelchair is not doing so good. I’m looking at getting a power chair now. At the time, I hoped it would give me a little more time outside of my home so the burden of my illness wouldn’t feel so heavy on him. I was still trying so hard to make this easier—to take up less space, to need less. I can see now how much I was trying to protect him from the weight of something I was carrying alone.

As these changes occurred, I kept fighting and using all my resources to keep going.

On February 18th, 2017, I received another devastating diagnosis called Psoriatic Arthritis. And then again in July 2023, I got another one called Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS) which is an autoimmune blood disorder.

My life is suddenly a cascade of autoimmune diseases. I have not beat the statistics. It is very common for autoimmune patients to develop more autoimmune diseases as they get sicker.

Obviously I had to make very difficult decisions. I was no longer capable of working full time or traveling. Instead, I was doing everything I could to cope with the reality of what my life was becoming.

In fact, after making a 16-hour flight home in June 2023, I’ve learned I can no longer fly because of APS. My blood is sticky and flying is high risk after I came back with to Taiwan with blood clots.

Letting Go With Chronic Illness: How To Simplify Life

I had to learn to accept what I needed and what I didn’t need with chronic illness. Growth comes from making room for new things after all.

It was then that I started getting rid of certain elements of my life that were causing me stress.

I’m not a quitter. I started pulling back on everything back then. I decided that if my health hadn’t improved by August 2017, which was when my sister and her husband where throwing their wedding reception, I would back out of everything.

I ended up doing that. I backed out of in person volunteer work, travel, and extra work I had been doing. My desire to see my sister get married was strong.

In reality, I was carrying the full workload on my own, even as my health was deteriorating. I flipped my work hours and started sleeping in longer and working later in the evening to see if the sleep-ins helped with my chronic insomnia. It did help. It was a good change to make, and I’ve kept those work hours ever since.

May 2017 came and went, and there was no improvement in my health.

I was out of time to buy tickets home to Canada. My doctor did not think I should fly home without access to medical care in Canada. It wasn’t safe for me to fly when I had spent the last part of 2016 and the first part of 2017 with endless trips being rushed to the hospital.

My body was saying NO MORE. STOP. STOP. STOP.

By August 2017, I knew I would spend the rest of the year tying up loose ends in my life so I could finally rest in 2018. I did this on my own.

I was not able to fly home in 2017.

The loss and heartache of not being able to do this was almost unbearable. It had devastating consequences on my mental health and overall well-being.

My one and only goal in 2018 was to try and get some of my health back so I could fly home to see my family.

Thankfully, I was able to fly in 2018. I was also able to fly home to Canada again in 2019. But then 2020, 2021 and 2022 were not possible. I thought I’d be able to fly in 2022, but then I came out of remission and I had to cancel my flight again.

The trips I was able to make made me very sick. Each year, I was housebound for six to eight weeks recovering from the flights to Canada.

The routine of being sick every day with very few good days in between has never left. In September 2019, I had finally tied off the last few things I was struggling to get out of. I was focused on rest and trying to work a few hours per day with my own business.

But then the stress of coming up with astronomical amounts of money for my medications kicked in. That has also had a huge impact on my health.

Slowing Down and Acceptance With My Chronic Life

During all this time, I found it exceptionally hard to slow down, simplify life, and care for myself without support. My journey in 2017 toward letting go with chronic illness began, but it hasn’t ended yet.

Seven years later, I’m facing the reality that this journey may never end.

As for letting go of physical things in my home, I knew I could do the hard part of scaling back.

As it turns out, I lost everything in my home in December 2025.

This was only the beginning of what letting go would truly mean.

After all, I had done it before. In 2003, I packed my entire life into a few boxes, stored them with my family, and moved to China with just a few bags. By 2006, I arrived in Taiwan with little more than a couple of backpacks. Over a decade later, I found myself surrounded by a life filled with things again—almost as if I had come full circle to where I started before leaving North America.

Why are we so afraid to let go of things in our lives that cause us stress?

Why does it take so long? Why are we afraid to practice self-care? 

For me, I can say without doubt that my drive to succeed came at a great personal cost to my health and soul.

I struggled to figure out which parts of my life were causing the most stress. I told myself over and over that I couldn’t keep juggling all of it. There was no time to run my own business, continue my volunteer work, keep up with my health (29 visits to the hospital in 2017 and 32 in 2018), and sustain my relationship.

In the end, I chose to remove everything else and focus on the relationship. At the time, it felt like the only thing I had left to hold on to.

I cleared out the parts of my life in my home that were gone years ago.

Anything that caused me stress, anything that did not bring me joy, anything that caused me to exert energy all went out the door, room by room, item by item, with many tears and silent reminders to look forward to tomorrow and not think about the past or the future.

“I had to learn to live in the ‘now’ with chronic illness. It’s hard to live in the present when you have illness or things or people in your life that won’t allow you to do that. Carrie – My Several Worlds”

To achieve my goal, I took a serious look at everything in my life. I looked at all the things in my home; all the people who were there or not there or who were draining me.

I let toxic friendships go. When my family didn’t understand, they slowly drifted out of my life too.

It was hard to accept that some people couldn’t support having someone who was sick all the time. I made a conscious decision not to allow those people access to my life anymore.

As for my living space, letting go of what I had accumulated in Taiwan wasn’t as hard as I expected. I chipped away at it room by room over the course of a year, and then did it again in 2020, 2022, and 2025.

When the time came, leaving it behind wasn’t the hardest part. But there were pieces of my life I deeply wanted to keep—my USB, my photos, my pottery, my books. They may have just been things, but they held my memories, my work, and parts of who I was.

Some possessions sat in a corner for months while I deliberated over whether I should keep them or not. In the end, I realized if I was thinking so much about it, it probably needed to go.

I can’t speak to how John handled that time. What I know is that I carried it. I did the work. I made the decisions. I let go—piece by piece, room by room.

I closed that chapter of my life on my own.

By the time I got to October 2017, I was down to the basics. I went through it all again once more to decide if it really deserved a place in my new normal.

Why keep heels if I can’t walk in them? Why keep party dresses if I can’t wear them? Why keep books I have read or paperwork that we haven’t looked at in over eight years?

I gave it all away or threw it out.

This is what I’ve learned after years of personal experience with chronic illness

Change your mindset in order to let go of one life to make room for your new life. Clearing out and letting go is a way of life. It’s also a journey.

Clearing out means letting go of things, people, and thoughts that prevent you from living the life you must live to be happy. Grief for a loved one, grief for oneself, illness, betrayal, and anger are all things that you can let go of if you work on it.

Put yourself first and practice self-love.

It’s easy to care for others. It’s also easy to neglect yourself in this day and age as we are swept along in day to day life.

Clearing your heart and mind starts and ends with you. If you don’t feel safe to do it, you can’t let go. You create your safety net by recognizing what needs to be dealt with.

Slow down.

Clearing old habits and resisting past behavior traits that cause you stress are not possible if you don’t slow down and take time to make the changes. This means you need to practice awareness, not rush through everything.

Simplify your home and living space. Unplug, do less, be more.

Figure out what your fight or flight triggers are and cut them out.

Triggers could be places, people, sounds, things, and emotions. The things that keep you stuck in place and experiencing the same emotional reaction – those things need to go. Once you know your triggers, you can start to move forward WITHOUT THEM.

It’s ok to vent to people that you trust as you’re working through this process.

It’s natural. If they aren’t accepting, let them go.

Cultivate self-care inside yourself and your home. Clearing the space around you can change the energy around you.

Set boundaries with other people. Understand what is yours and what doesn’t belong to you. Let go of old stories. Make room for new stories. Learn to live knowing you are enough.

You can break the chains of bad habits, pain, and cycles of grief when you realize you don’t need all that extra stuff.

It took me a year to clear my space. 365 days to clear everything out. A year to explore myself and understand what I did and didn’t need in my life. My closets, bookshelves, filing cabinets, office space, kitchen cupboards, and boxes of memories have been whittled down once more, just like I whittled my life down in 2003 when I left for Asia.

The sense of peace and calm I have now that I’ve broken free of the chains that were causing me so much stress are overwhelming, but reassuring.

I now understand the term ‘the incredible lightness of being‘ – an absolute absence of burden.

And no matter how much physical pain is ahead of me in my life, I know I’ve done the best I can do to start fresh and be less fearful while being happier and kinder towards myself.

Clearing out is one of the most calming, therapeutic practices you can possibly do for yourself because you are consciously letting go with each step.

It can all be done in a year.

It all starts with you.

Chronically yours,