There is a moment every lupus warrior knows. The moment you realise your body is not the enemy you have been taught to believe it is.
I remember mine clearly. I had spent years treating my body like something to fight, to push through, to override. Lupus does that to us. It teaches us to see our own flesh as a battlefield, our own fatigue as failure, our own pain as something to hide so the world keeps believing we are fine.
I was diagnosed with Neuropathy SLE in 2016 and for a long time I lived in survival mode. The doctors told me that I would be paralysed from my waist down. I kept building, kept performing, kept saying yes when my body was screaming no. I thought strength meant never stopping. I thought remission, if it ever came, would feel like winning.
It did not feel like winning. It felt like something far quieter and far more powerful. It felt like permission.
Permission to rest without guilt. Permission to say this diagnosis does not get to write the whole story. Permission to become, in my own time and on my own terms, a woman who is resourceful rather than a woman who is merely resilient.
That distinction matters more than I can say. Resilience is what gets you through the storm. Resourcefulness is what you build once the storm has passed. It is the skill of gathering everything you have learned, every scar, every setback, every quiet victory, and turning it into something that moves you forward.
I have been in remission since 2020. I wrote a book about that journey, Lupus My Legend, because I needed other warriors to know that the diagnosis is not the ending. It is a chapter. A hard one, an unfair one sometimes, but never the whole book.
Today, through ReSourceHER, a company I founded, I work with women navigating exactly this kind of transition, the moment when life as you knew it has been interrupted and you are left wondering who you become next. Lupus was my transition. For you it might be something else entirely. But the questions are the same. Who am I now? What do I do with everything this illness has taught me? How do I stop merely surviving and start actually living?
If there is one thing I want every warrior reading this to hear, it is this. Your body is not betraying you. It is asking you to listen differently. And when you finally do, you will find that what feels like loss can become the very ground you rebuild yourself on.
You are not broken. You are becoming. And that becoming is yours to shape.
With so much love and solidarity,
Prithee G Founder, ReSourceHER| Lupus Remission Advocate | Author of Lupus My Legend
www.resourceher.co.za