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It took me a long time to know that acceptance isn’t something you arrive at and stay there forever more. It’s something you work on, all the time. In my new column for HealthCentral, I talk about how I do that:

“Let’s say you found an old lamp at a flea market and it had a genie inside. What would be your first wish? I know what mine would be. I’d wish to be cured of my rheumatoid arthritis (RA). No one’s crazy enough to actually choose to have a chronic illness, and since there’s currently no cure (and I’m still searching for that magical lamp), having RA is something I’ve had to learn to accept over the half-century I’ve had it. What no one ever told me was just how much work it would require. In fact, it’s taken decades—and the right treatment—to get here.

I grew up with this disease in an age when there were no effective treatments, so by the time I was 16, my RA had screwed up my body so much that I needed a power wheelchair. In addition to living with the daily pain, inflammation, fatigue, nausea, and other delightful symptoms, I had the extra barriers that come with being a wheelchair-user. I was very sad for a very long time, constantly caught up in what I couldn’t do. I focused on the “if onlys”—if only I didn’t have RA; if only I could walk; if only life were different. There was even a time when I thought that the only way to end the pain was to end my life. In those darkest of times, the reponse I received from loved ones and my doctors was the same: You have to learn to accept this. Acceptance is the last concept in the five stages of grief and grieving is very much what you do when you’re diagnosed with a chronic illness.”

Read the rest of my column on figuring out how to accept RA on HealthCentral.