In May 2018, I was formally diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and spent the entire bank holiday weekend in a gastro ward watching fellow patients walk by with IVs and ports attached somewhere to their bodies from the little window of my hospital room.

Some milestones were met that year – I turned 18, stayed in a hospital and had an IV put in for the first time. But many weren’t.

I was too fatigued to pass my A levels and didn’t go to university with my friends. I couldn’t have my first foray into alcohol since I had no clue if my gut could handle anything other than my ‘safety foods’ – scrambled eggs and Heinz soup. I missed my first concert because I couldn’t make the trip to the venue, let alone sit down to watch the show.

It is incredibly taxing to feel yourself defined solely by your condition and depressing to realise how much of your identity in society is based on good physical health and the ability to pursue activities unburdened by exhaustion.

Such identity issues are more prevalent in under-represented populations, such as the LGBTQ+ community and ethnic minorities – who often cannot find representations in media and healthcare of their situations.

As a result, many chronically ill people use creative media to voice our struggles and develop communities that support and enable open discussion about our lives and our conditions.

While navigating through my struggles with my identity after diagnosis, I noticed that the platforms that I relied on for emotional or mental support were all creative/artistic in some way. Online content creators such as Hannah Witton and Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, and artists on Instagram such as The Chronically Honest provided a lot of joy and emotional support that I was otherwise finding difficult to gain with my limited energy.

I also noticed that alongside the benefit of time flexibility with creative media, feelings and thoughts that are often hard to express with a chronic illness are easier to explain and, consequently - easier for those without any experience of chronic illness to understand.

Moreover, much of the narrative and imagery around the chronic illness is negative. There is a lot of focus on what we can’t do and what people don’t understand. 

The theme of intersectional identity and chronic illness came from my struggles with identity following my diagnosis. The month before my diagnosis, I had turned 18, so alongside transitioning from a teenager to a young adult - I was facing an identity shift from moderately healthy to chronically ill for the rest of my life.

Furthermore, my consultant at the time told me that I wasn’t the typical Crohn’s patient. I was South Korean, not Ashkenazi Jewish. No one in my family had bowel problems, and I didn’t smoke. I didn’t fit the description of someone with a chronic illness.

The other parts of my identity, such as my South Korean heritage, were often ignored when they were so integral to my well-being and health. Of course, I understand that health professionals have limited time and a lot of patients to see - but when the only thing they see from you is a condition - it drains you. It’s so important that people know that those with chronic illness are more than just their condition; their stories are not just one and the same.

Without giving too much away, people can expect a small but welcoming space for those with chronic illnesses and those without. In the words of one of the collaborators, the exhibition's goal is to make “uncomfortable conversations comfortable.”

Many of us with IBD find it very draining to talk about our conditions to those who don’t have any experience and that they are not properly understood. But I hope that through the medium of art, the exhibition will be able to provide an introduction to life with chronic illness to the inexperienced and reassurance that the struggles are mutual and real to those with chronic illness.