“He walks with such confidence,” I told my therapist.

“His head is up, he’s looking straight ahead with his shoulders back. Just so confident. He doesn’t get that from me at all,” I told her.

She looked at me through the screen of our Zoom call.

I had just told my therapist about the way my teenage son walks to the car when I pick him up from school. His hands in his pockets. The AirPods in his ears. The way he puts up his hand to thank a motorist for stopping and allowing him to cross at the stop-sign to reach my car.

“Why doesn’t he get it from you?” she asked.

“I was always self-conscious of how I looked. I had terrible acne. Terrible, to the point where I remember feeling appreciative that I didn’t have to look at myself all day, and I felt bad that my friends and teachers and classmates did have to look at my face,” I admitted.

“I never thought of myself as super pretty. I never thought someone would look at me with affection and find me attractive. I was the girl who helped when a classmate had missed a day and needed to copy down the notes. I was the girl who tutored in Algebra II. Boys didn’t ask for my number for a date; they wanted to schedule tutoring sessions,” I said.

My therapist paused for a bit.

“I don’t see it that way, though. You do have a lot of confidence. You’ve done things in your life that were only possible because you had self-confidence,” she said.

“You put yourself through school. You relied on public transportation. You worked. You got married. All while attending college. You never thought you couldn’t do those things. You never seemed to second-guess yourself. You knew what needed to be done, and you also knew you would go out there and find a way to do it. That is self-confidence,” she said.

Since that therapy session, I find myself thinking about the idea of self-confidence. I find myself going over my limited definition and comparing it with the broader explanation my therapist offered me as a way to reframe it for myself.

I always thought self-confidence had more to do with your outside beauty, your physical appearance, than your inner beauty, your personality. In that respect, I knew my grades were stronger than my looks. Which now I recognize as a form of self-confidence, but at the time, I didn’t see it that way. It all came down to what I saw in the mirror. My body may not have been Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition material, but that was okay with me. I never wanted to pose in something that covered less skin than my daily bra and underwear. I knew my face was never going to be photographed and used for a Cover Girl ad, and I didn’t want close-ups of my face on any ads in any magazines. Back in my college days, my lips were horrendously chapped, a side effect of my strong acne medication. There was no chance People Magazine would deem me worthy of gracing the pages of their Most Beautiful People issue.

I accepted that, because I appreciated my body for what it could do. And it could do a lot. My body was this incredible tool, allowing me to do what needed to be done. My body was strong, dependable, and unwavering, and nowhere was it more evident than in the years after my high school graduation.

I chose my colleges (first a community college, then a state college) largely based on their accessibility to public transportation. Not having a car wasn’t going to stop me from earning my Bachelor’s degree and becoming a teacher. I selected my classes based on bus schedules and my part-time work schedule (for a time I worked in a flower shop, then I worked in a public library for the rest of my college years). As a result, I became the first in my family to earn a college degree.

There was no second guessing. No hesitation and wondering if I could really do this — attend college, work, spend almost four hours a day on public transportation. After all, my legs were strong. Walking to and from bus stops. Standing on the bus, holding onto the pole with one hand, and using my other hand to hold my backpack which I had swung around to wear in the front. I walked across campus, upstairs and back downstairs. I stood in line, waiting to board a bus, waiting for a restroom stall, waiting to purchase textbooks. I stood at my jobs, arranging a dozen roses in a vase, shelving recently returned books back to their proper Dewey Decimal spots on the shelves.

My body worked, and I did what I could to maintain it and keep it working. I never smoked. (Always felt foolish to smoke when I have asthma.) I only occasionally enjoyed a peach margarita. I tried to eat relatively healthy and exercise when I could and not pull any all-nighters. I had confidence that my body would continue to work. Years later, nine years after we were married, seven years after earning my college degree, I felt incredibly confident that my body was ready for its most important task — becoming pregnant and giving birth to a healthy baby.

My pregnancy was not only planned, it was strategically planned. I didn’t want to give birth to my child during the middle of a school year. I was aiming for the least-amount-of-interruption for my students and the most-time-together-option for my baby. I planned to take advantage of my maternity leave and add it onto my summer vacation off from teaching. (My son was born in late March. I got to be a stay-at-home mom until the new school year started in September.)

I remember feeling confident when I was pregnant. My body was strong and capable and thriving. A new life, my son, was growing within my body. My body was doing that. And when it came time, my body delivered him, with no pain medication and within six hours of checking into the hospital.

My body was always able to do what I wanted it to do and what I needed it to do.

Until one Sunday morning, when I woke up and couldn’t stand up. Suddenly something I had done thousands of time throughout my life — wake up and swing my legs off the side of the bed and stand up — was something I couldn’t do.

My left calf was swollen and looked distorted like a misshapen balloon, as if I was looking at a reflection in a fun house mirror. My calf was bright red, the color of our son’s stuffed Elmo. Not only did it look horrendous, my leg didn’t “work;” it couldn’t support my weight. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t walk. My husband sat me in our desk chair with wheels and rolled me out to the car. We dropped our son off at my parents’ house and rushed to the
emergency room.

My body failed me.

That July day, more than a decade ago, was both the beginning and the end. The end of my life as I had known it up until that point. The beginning of my life as a chronic illness patient. I just didn’t know any of that at the time.

I thought my swollen calf was a one-off. An odd, unexpected illness that I would recover from, and file away the whole situation as one of those stories I would tell sometime in the future. It would join other health and medical experiences like the time I had my wisdom teeth extracted or the time I cut my hand while trying to cut an avocado.

But this illness wasn’t like that at all.

The short version — I was admitted into the hospital where I stayed for four days while being treated for cellulitis, a bacterial infection. (Though some of my current doctors have expressed ambivalence and are not quite sure cellulitis was the cause.) My calf eventually returned to normal size. I was able to again swing my legs out of bed and stand and walk and drive myself. In the fall, I returned to my classroom to teach a new group of fourth graders.

Except my left leg was never the same after that July day. My leg felt heavy as if I had strapped on weights around my lower legs. As if my then two-year-old son was sitting on my lap, even when he wasn’t. As if I carried some kind of invisible shackle, dragging it behind me as I tried to walk faster. My leg felt hard and tight, as if stuck in a perpetual Charlie horse. As if it was being pinched or squeezed.

It was difficult to describe the pain, because I did my best to hide it. You couldn’t see my discomfort, my struggle to complete simple everyday tasks like stepping into and out of the bathtub for my nightly shower. I continued teaching and mothering and my life in general, except I did everything with daily pain. A year and a half later, after scans and tests and blood work, after a muscle biopsy and meetings with neurologists and rheumatologists and a vascular surgeon, I was diagnosed with an invisible disability, an autoimmune disease called Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease (UCTD).

I had never heard of UCTD, and I admit I didn’t really know much about autoimmune diseases, until I was diagnosed with one. Autoimmune diseases are tricky and hard to diagnose because their symptoms are rather diverse and can range from mild to severe. Quite often symptoms of autoimmune diseases, such as fatigue and/or low-grade fever and/or muscle aches, are also symptoms of many other illnesses. Autoimmune diseases can present differently in each patient, which makes a lot of treatment feel like a science experiment, as in “let’s try this medication and see if it helps.”

However, there is one commonality autoimmune diseases share — the body attacks itself. My body stopped working the way I wanted it to. The way it was supposed to. I fought the changes, and tried to ignore the pain and rise above it. But the whole mind over matter way of thinking doesn’t necessarily apply to chronic pain. I struggled to make it through the school day, finding myself crying at recess and lunch breaks while my students played handball and kickball outside. I fell once in my classroom. One early morning, I got stuck in the school elevator, an accommodation I used when I wasn’t with my students. Each day, I came home depleted of energy, feeling like I was cheating my young son and my husband and myself, because of the extreme pain and fatigue I experienced during my workday.

Reluctantly I filed the paperwork for a retirement due to a disability. My rheumatologist assured me the state would accept my application. Yet, a part of me hoped the state wouldn’t. If the state deemed my autoimmune disease as “not bad enough,” I could keep teaching, hopeful that this consistently high level of pain would eventually taper off. But that’s not what happened.

I did qualify for early retirement, and I have had no choice but to acknowledge that my life, my family’s life, is forever impacted by this invisible disability of mine. Nowadays my body — including my pain, my energy, my strength — feels out of my control. I take my medication. I do my physical-therapy-recommended stretches at home. I take daily walks. Yet, I never know how I’m going to feel when I wake up. I never can predict when I might suddenly be hit with an intense leg cramp or spasm or crushing pain in my leg. I don’t know why one trip to Target brings me to tears, but not all trips to Target. I can’t explain why one day I can empty our dishwasher rather easily, and another day emptying the dishwasher feels like a Herculean challenge.

It’s easy to look at my body and feel disappointed, disheartened, and cheated. I’m in my forties, a time when many women feel empowered, as if they have reached their prime. But that’s not how I feel. I feel like my aging process has been sped up, like a time lapse video. I feel like my body can’t entirely be relied on, as if I’m defective.

I’m closer to fifty than I am to forty and am trying to make peace with this compromised body of mine. Occasionally I look at myself in the mirror and linger on my face. I think back to all those days when I yearned for clearer skin. Now, an occasional pimple doesn’t even register on my list of things to be concerned about. Now my self-consciousness has transferred to my left leg with its two scars (from two different muscle biopsies) and prominent red, blue, and purple veins.

I look at my high-schooler as he approaches our car at the end of his school day. Head up. Shoulders back. And I realize that is how I walk — even now. I walk slowly, and not nearly as far as I used to. But I am walking each day. Purposefully. Intentionally. I have to keep going; “move it or lose it,” doctors warn. So with determination and perseverance, I place one foot in front of the other. Over and over.

And I’ll keep doing that as long as I can. In that, I am confident.

-Wendy Kennar

Wendy Kennar is a mother, wife, writer, and former teacher. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications and anthologies, both in print and online. You can read more from Wendy at www.wendykennar.com where she writes about books, boys, and bodies (living with an invisible disability). You can also find Wendy on Instagram @wendykennar. Wendy is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays.