On The Balance of Life, Love, and Chronic Illness, a guest post by Marissa Eller

I don’t think I’ve collected all that much wisdom over the years, but the one thing I learned pretty early on is that this life is all about balance. It’s about the balance between serving others and caring for yourself. Between productivity and rest, planning and spontaneity. 

When you veer into the world of chronic illness, your sense of balance is entirely upended. That part of your ear or whatever that controls your whole vestibular system? It’s suddenly upside down. Now you have to find balance between things you have to do today and things you have to do tomorrow – because you can’t do all of them. There’s something called The Spoon Theory that tries to explain this phenomenon. Essentially, you wake up with a certain number of spoons each day. I don’t know why it’s spoons instead of something fun like ice cream cones or unicorns, but just stay with me here. You never know how many spoons you’ll wake up with. Maybe enough to take a shower and work and feed yourself. Maybe not. If you overdo it (and we absolutely all overdo it) you have to borrow from tomorrow’s spoons – meaning you’ll wake up in misery and have to stay in bed all day. 

In terms of balance, this means that you’re trying to stay standing on moving ground. Not like a treadmill, but like an earthquake. When I set out to write something about chronic illness, that’s what I thought I couldn’t do – replicate the moving ground. I didn’t think I could fictionalize waking up not knowing how you’re going to feel. I had to, though. I didn’t think it would be an accurate depiction of life with rheumatoid arthritis (or my life with it, anyway) without that sense of feeling off-balance. 

In doing that, I discovered how much more there is to balance in a romance novel, especially for teens. My characters have to be wholly themselves and interact realistically with each other. They have to navigate their interests and lives at school and home and debate their futures. That’s one thing that teenage life and chronic illness have in common, the ground is always moving. In JOINED AT THE JOINTS, Ivy is dealing with coming of age and medical self-advocacy and secrets and friendships and her first love. I’m overwhelmed for her just thinking about it. If you asked me how I found balance in all that in her story, I couldn’t tell you. What I cared more about was that my teenage readers felt seen and understood in my depiction of the wobbly nature of both chronic illness and this phase of their lives. I wanted them to know that I understood, and I remembered the way everything about life at seventeen seemed to change by the minute. 

Most of all, I wanted to balance a realistic depiction of chronic illness with a general sense of happiness and contentment. So many people think that chronic illness is the worst thing that can happen to a person, and I never wanted to downplay how serious and life-altering it can be. Beyond that though, I wanted to show that we can still be happy and chronically ill. We contain multitudes. I wanted to show that there’s balance. 

In doing so, I spent a lot of time thinking about the tone of my book, because I didn’t want to write a sad one. I can’t even read sad books, I definitely couldn’t handle writing them. I’m far too fragile for that, and so is Ivy. She’s fragile, but she’s happy. She has a wonderful, charmed life. Even among grief and illness and the natural dramatics of high school, I hoped to achieve some balance. For Ivy, this meant baseball games and re-engineering her late grandmother’s recipes so they’re safe for her gluten-free household. It meant being the person who offered to cook for everyone at the party instead of just hanging out. It meant a breakdown in the school bathroom at a dance and nearly panicking when someone does something nice for her, because she just doesn’t have friends who do that. 

The way that I found balance for Ivy was through Grant. He’s on the field at the baseball games and sitting on the counter while she works on those recipes. He washes the dishes while she cooks for everyone at the party. He becomes an attention vacuum when she wants to hide under the table in response to compliments. He’s the one who causes that relentless anxiety just by doing something nice for her, because before he was anything else, he was the kind of friend who always would. 

Ivy says Grant is better at this whole chronically ill thing than she is, and she’s ultimately kind of right. He’s better at that balance she hasn’t quite found yet. While making both my protagonist and her love interest exactly the same kind of chronically ill was absolutely intentional, it wasn’t about balance at first. As much as I’d thought about that elusive relationship between chronic illness and happiness, the one that so many people think is a stark dichotomy, it was simpler than that. They both have RA because I wanted to explore the differences in two people that have the same disease. What I didn’t see at the time was how those differences would allow them to find balance. They would allow them to make each other significantly happier and no less chronically ill. 

I didn’t realize that by the end, they’d be able to happily walk hand-in-hand over moving ground. 

Meet the author

Marissa Eller is a novelist with chronic pain and an abundance of emotions. She holds a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, which she uses in her work as an academic consultant. She resides in Hickory, North Carolina with her family and two rescue cats, all of whom she couldn’t love more if she tried. When not writing, reading, or helping students, she can be found thinking entirely too much about her favorite TV shows, obsessing over a band she’s loved since she was fifteen, or enjoying an afternoon nap. JOINED AT THE JOINTS is her first novel. 

Links: https://linktr.ee/marissaeller

About Joined at the Joints

When baking-obsessed Ivy meets a boy who shares her rare diagnosis, sparks fly outside of the kitchen for the first time in her life!

Chronically ill seventeen-year-old Ivy has stayed inside baking all summer—pies are better than people, and they don’t trigger her social anxiety. So when her (also) chronically ill mom and sister cook up a plan to get Ivy out of the house and into a support group, Ivy doesn’t expect to say more than a few words.

And she certainly doesn’t expect Grant. Grant is CUTE: class-clown cute, perfectly-messy-hair cute, will-always-text-you-back cute. There’s an instant connection between them. He has the same illness as her—juvenille rheumatoid arthritis—and he actually understands Ivy’s world. But just because he understands her pain doesn’t mean he can take it away, and she wishes he could… because it’s getting worse. Ivy has always tried her best to seem “normal,” but between symptom management, new treatment plans, and struggling with medical self-advocacy, being sick feels more and more difficult. With her energy plummeting, even her bestie starts drifting away! What if Grant does, too? Will Ivy’s sugar-sweet romance pan out? Can she maintain her façade, for him and for the world… or should she be brave and let it drop?

Marissa Eller serves up a sweet, satisfying romcom that tackles the realities of chronic illness—and coming-of-age milestones from friend breakups to first kisses—with wry humor, tons of heart, and a huge helping of honesty. Nuanced, funny, and deeply enjoyable, readers will fall for Eller’s voice in this compelling debut that offers all the right ingredients.

ISBN-13: 9780823456215
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 07/02/2024
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post