I started off my life with Crohn’s as a nine year old boy with very little support outside my family … and frankly I just did not want anyone to know. I had some goals – mostly about excelling in school. During my years of elementary school and junior high, I told nobody about the battle I was having inside.  I didn’t want anybody to know about it and I certainly did not want to stick out from the crowd. “I want to be invisible,” I remember myself saying.

If you ask my friends now, they will most likely tell you that I stick out like a sore thumb. After you show your face on a video screen in front of the entire high school to tell them about Crohn’s everyone pretty much knows who you are. The other thing they might tell you is that Alex loves not being "normal" and he is okay with being different.

Some of this perspective on my changed life came to light while I was sitting in church listening to a sermon. I honestly don’t listen to all the sermons.  Maybe it’s that some of them are just over my head; but this one was different.  In his sermon the minister at my church compared the breaking of bread to the breaking open of one’s heart. He says, “We don’t usually think of being broken as a good thing. The word ‘broken’ really has a bad sense about it, suggesting that something is useless because it doesn’t work anymore. But suppose we think of it more in terms of ‘broken open’ and offering a way to get to the inside of the thing.” His philosophy about broken hearts really struck me. I wonder now whether he wrote this sermon about me.  Because when I think back I was broken (or at least my intestines were); and somewhere along the way that broken heart or broken situation, in my case, opened up.

I am now okay with everyone knowing I have Crohn’s.  I don’t have to hide in a corner when my Mom flushes my PICC line and I am okay wearing my backpack with my TPN lines hanging out and the pumps whirring away in public.  I enjoy meeting with my Doctor and talking about my disease with him, and speaking to other people with ostomies and IBD. The things that I hid from before have turned into my favorite things to do. The shy, soft-spoken boy has been replaced by an open, out-spoken one because I was willing to open my heart to my disease.

For a long time, I thought I owed people disclosure of my Crohn’s disease. I thought it was as obvious as my hair color and couldn’t get far into a conversation without it coming up in some way. And in truth, virtually any story from the last nine years relates back to my IBD, but nevertheless the disclosure was a near-immediate thing.

I challenged myself when I came to school to not tell people. Not to hide it from anyone, but to be Jennie first and a person living with Crohn’s second. But now, as I apply to graduate school, I feel torn.

Whenever I tell someone that I want to be a pediatric psychologist for chronically ill children, they always raise their eyebrows and comment on how specific it is. Why, they want to know, did I choose that? Well (insert sigh here), I often tell them, I have Crohn’s disease.

But this, in all reality, is not really true. Of course I do have Crohn’s, but I don’t want to be a psychologist because I have Crohn’s. My exposure to pediatric chronic illness was because of being a patient, but why I want to pursue Psychology is because I’m extremely passionate about the field and doing research. Not as a patient, as an academic.

And this is the push and pull of my disclosure saga - to tell or not to tell. It’s one thing when I’m sitting face to face with someone and have the opportunity to explain and show (aka flash) my ostomy and delve into my whole gut-filled story. Sure, okay. It’s quite another when I’m applying to graduate school and trying to articulate my relevant research experience, to people that I have never met before all over the country who will likely only look at my application for a matter of minutes. In this case, disclosing excessively seems unnecessary - an unprovoked therapy session almost - and so I’ve tried to step carefully, disclosing succinctly in a way that does not consume my personal essay.

The heart of the issue is that it’s my story to tell. Disclosing is a choice and I get to decide who gets to know. Be it for graduate school, or a new friend, or a boyfriend, I can choose whose business it is.

Because I am not Crohn’s. I am Jennie, and proud of it.

Jennie

“Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine; they are wounded storytellers.  People tell stories to make sense of their suffering; when they turn their diseases into stories, they find healing.”  James Swanton, in forward to The Wounded Storyteller:  Body, Illness, and Ethics (1997). 

My girls love when I tell them scary stories.  Not the overly gory kind, never with bad endings, but definitely the kind with those spooky “just around the corner” monsters that, in the end, are shrunk, tamed, made nice, or were never really monsters in the first place.