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Liking yourself, loving your body, can be a real challenge with RA. In my new column for HealthCentral, I talk about my past struggles with body image, how I learned to celebrate who I am, and share tips for how you can, too:

“CAN YOU FEEL beautiful with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)? For a very long time I didn’t think so and it did a number on my body image and self-esteem. So much so that for several decades, I shut down my idea of myself as a physical being, focusing instead on my intelligence and my personality, which I felt were my only interesting or attractive features. I viewed myself as a “brain in a jar,” with my body serving merely as a container. I’m not alone in this dissociation from my physical self. I’ve met women who have stopped wearing rings or nail polish and hide their hands, ashamed of the visible signs of their RA. I’ve talked to many who hate their bodies because of the pain within them. And it makes life with a chronic illness much more difficult. Loving yourself, embracing your body just the way it is, can lend peace to your mind and quite possibly peace to your body, as well.

By now, you know my story: I grew up with RA in the time before treatment and because of it, had to start using a power wheelchair in my teens. RA took my ability to walk and twisted my joints at a crucial developmental stage. My friends were becoming women and I became disabled. I knew no one else like me and saw none like me in magazines, movies, or books. My only defense against a world that at best treated me as invisible and at worst stigmatized me was to ignore my physicality.”

Read my column on loving yourself, RA and all, on HealthCentral.