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It’s so hard to miss out on all the fun and important things because rheumatoid arthritis got in the way (AGAIN!). In my new column for HealthCentral, I share ways of being flexible so you can you work around the barriers:

“WHENEVER I HEAR a healthy person talking about FOMO (fear of missing out), I want to cry and laugh at the same time. You want to talk real FOMO? Try living with an unpredictable chronic illness that randomly takes over your life for days or months at a time! Despite having shared my life with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for more than five decades, I still haven’t learned that doing anything with this condition is a start-and-stop process. That is, my brain knows that this is a real possibility, but my heart breaks a little every time I have to cancel plans, something that frequently happens to all of us in the chronic illness community. But the unpredictability of RA also has the deeper and even more serious effect of interfering with the bigger things. If you have RA, you might even feel that this condition has robbed you of the ability to pursue the wonderful plans you had for your life. This doesn’t have to be true. In fact, I think that having dreams and plans is exactly what you need to get through the hard times. In this column, I’ll share some of the strategies that have helped me chase (and even achieve) my dreams with RA.

When you live with chronic illness, it can feel as if everyone else’s life is perfect and progressing unhindered along a smooth path of success and achievements. But the fact that FOMO is such a common term that it has its own acronym and hashtag tells you that you’re not alone. Everyone’s life gets interrupted and sidetracked. Sometimes for good reasons, such as being more hands-on as a parent during the early years of your child’s life. Or sometimes it’s for unexpected challenges like an accident, natural disaster, a parent’s illness, or not getting the job you very much wanted. And this brings me to my first strategy for coping with FOMO.”

Read my column on how to work around RA so you don’t have to have FOMO on HealthCentral.