Sliding Doors: How I’m Learning Not To Grieve What May Have Been While Living With Chronic Illness

The list of my conditions is what we in the chronic illness community call an “alphabet soup.” Between my EDS, IC, CSID, POTS, and Hashimoto’s, I could start a rival soup company to Campbell’s. Maybe one of these days I’ll write an article detailing my experiences more, but this piece is about my journey in grieving the unknown cost of my illnesses and parting ways with that grief.

I only discovered four out of my five diagnoses in April 2022. In 2021, at the age of 26, I lost four organs, including my uterus, to endometriosis and adenomyosis. In hindsight, there were signs in childhood that something was deeply wrong with my body, but it didn’t alter and impede normal life until I was about 16. Spending part of my teenage years and my entire adulthood feeling sick and exhausted, yet not having answers for any of it, was hard, to say the least. 

A recurring theme in my life is starting a hobby or pursuit, finding enjoyment and even an aptitude for it, and then having to give it up. I would say I dropped out of beauty school at 19 due to my health, but I don’t think it’s considered dropping out if you haven’t even finished the enrollment process. I had to turn down a coveted internship at an animal sanctuary at 22. Krav Maga was something I enjoyed for about a year, and now feels like a pipe dream. I have dozens of examples, and not all of them were busts exclusively due to my health. Sometimes it was due to my work schedule, finances, or lack of friends. Then again, it does come back around to my health since it affects those variables. At the risk of sounding conceited, there are a lot of things I’m good at or suspect I would be good at, many of which could have led to a very interesting career path. The eclectic variety of topics I’ve been passionate about could have led down any number of life paths.

Over the years, I’ve often wondered who I would have been and what I would have done if I didn’t have chronic illnesses. That’s a painful concept. I’ve shed tears over it many times. I’ve cried both tears of frustration and disappointment. My personality and passions felt so at odds with what I was able to do. It felt like I couldn’t live how I was meant to live. I tried to push those thoughts away and rationalize that maybe I wouldn’t like the person I would have become. Living with these limitations has shaped much of my personality, after all. My mom often wisely said, “Don’t worry about the what-ifs.” I took comfort in the idea that good things could still happen despite my limitations. Still, that knowledge wasn’t enough to shake the pain of my perceived loss of what might have been.

Over the years, I’ve often wondered who I would have been and what I would have done if I didn’t have chronic illnesses.

Oddly enough, my greatest comfort came in the form of the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. Don’t worry – this isn’t going to be one of those pieces where a young Millennial claims ‘90s nostalgia despite having only been a couple of years post Pull-Ups when the ‘90s ended (the ‘90s aesthetic is pretty great in this movie, though). If you haven’t seen it, first of all, you should, but also, major spoilers ahead.

In Sliding Doors, we watch a young Gwyneth Paltrow as Helen, a Londoner living with her long-term boyfriend. In the first few minutes of the movie, she gets fired (or “sacked,” as the English say) and rushes to catch a train home. In that moment, time splits into two realities: one where she catches the train to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman, and one where she misses the train and remains unaware of his affair for many months. In the reality where she catches him cheating, her life is immediately better. She dumps the jerk, moves in with her spunky best friend, starts her own business, which is successful, and gets a funny, sweet new boyfriend. All the ingredients of a good rom-com, right? In the other reality, we watch as she muddles through a stale relationship while his infidelity continues, we see her burned out from working multiple crummy jobs, and her life generally sucks. 

See moody, midriffy, ‘90s aesthetic below:

Through the whole movie, you’re thinking, obviously, the better reality is the first one. Until… *spoiler alert*

The sequence of events in her rom-com life lands her by pure chance on a street corner, where she’s hit by a car and dies. Meanwhile, the other reality is also looking bleak as she discovers her boyfriend’s infidelity and even suffers a miscarriage. But…she’s alive. The movie ends with her meeting the man from the other reality for the first time, and the audience is left with hope. 

As I turned off the tv, I thought of my own life like Sliding Doors – one reality where I’m not sick, and my current reality. I thought, “I bet when Helen finally found out he was cheating, she wondered if she could have found out sooner by catching that train.” I thought about how often she might have regretted that moment and wished she hadn’t missed it. Little did she know catching that train would have ultimately led to her early demise. That may seem simplistic and dramatic, but it made me ponder how much is truly outside our control. Helen hadn’t done anything to contribute to her death except be at the wrong place at the wrong time. 

It’s easy to tell ourselves, “I bet if I had done X, then Y and Z would have happened.” We tend to romanticize the imagined life a different choice may have led to. But there are so many unknown variables in life that it’s completely unrealistic and serves no purpose to think like that. There are infinite possibilities as to what certain choices may have led to. On the surface, they may look better than our own reality, but so did Helen’s.

We tend to romanticize the imagined life a different choice may have led to.

Granted, my health problems aren’t the result of my choices. But this line of thinking made me realize I had never given thought to all the negatives that might exist in these alternate, non-chronically ill realities I’ve always imagined. Maybe being healthy would have led to my demise. Maybe that demise wouldn’t have looked like getting hit by a car on a random street corner. Maybe it would have been the wrong man, the wrong career, or maybe it could have been something as dramatic as being in the wrong place at the wrong time like Helen.

That’s me, above, looking much less ‘90s midriffy and moody than Gwyneth Paltrow. That hospital gown did show some midriff in the back, though, if that counts?

Once I had that epiphany, I realized how futile it was to mourn the loss of… of what, exactly? Of a life full of unknowns and danger and risk and challenges just like any other life? It may seem silly to have such deep thoughts following a little Hollywood magic, but there really is a lesson to be learned there. Proverbs 27:1 says, “Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” When you apply that idea to the what-ifs accumulated in your mind over a lifetime, their significance and hold over you fade. I’m still human, so sometimes when I feel like I’m missing out or I have a flare-up, I again wonder what could have been. Then I take off the rose-colored glasses and remember Helen. I can never know what may have been, and it robs me of happiness and peace to imagine that I do. 

I can never know what may have been, and it robs me of happiness and peace to imagine that I do.

For anyone bearing the pain of what chronic illness has cost you, for anyone who feels they lost their youth to chronic illness, I know firsthand that no amount of encouraging words can stop the grief. It’s something you have to come to on your own. Just know that learning not to romanticize and to let go of the what-ifs brings so much peace of mind. Chronic illness can make you feel trapped in your body. It brings many things worth grieving over, but you can free your mind knowing that a what-if isn’t one of them. 

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