Somebody sees you at the grocery store on Tuesday moving fine.

Then Saturday you’re in a wheelchair at the family cookout and you can feel them looking. That’s a dynamic disability, and it’s most of us. A dynamic disability means your ability to function changes, sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour. It’s not that you were faking Tuesday or exaggerating Saturday. It’s that MS and lupus don’t hold still. Heat, a flare, a bad night of sleep, an infection, stress, or nothing identifiable at all can move you from walking unassisted to needing help in the span of an afternoon. This is why the cane comes out some days and not others. Why you can drive yourself to one appointment and need a ride to the next. Why you cook dinner Monday and can’t lift the pan Thursday. The trouble is that people build their whole understanding of your disability around whichever version of you they happened to see first, and then treat every other version as suspicious. If they met you on a good day, the bad days look like drama. If they met you on a bad day, the good days look like you were never that sick. Neither one is a performance. Both are just your Tuesday and your Saturday. You don’t owe anybody a consistent disability to be believed. If this is your life, tell us in the comments what you wish people understood about your good days. And if you want to be around women who never need this explained to them, comment COMMUNITY and we’ll send you the link to Beyond ILL. #WeAreILLMatic #DynamicDisability #BlackWomenWithMS #LupusAwareness #InvisibleIllness