I remember sitting in that dreary JobCentre, the air thick with the smell of damp coats and quiet desperation. In front of me was Leon, a bloke who saw me not as a person, but as a series of boxes to be ticked. “Can you lift a shoebox?” he’d asked. The absurdity of it all. My entire life, my adventures, my struggles, the constant, grinding war with my own body, all reduced to whether I could lift an empty sodding shoebox.
In that moment, the verdict felt final. I was an incapable claimant. A top-class failure. Case closed.
For years, that was the word that clung to me like the stench of a burst abscess: failure. It’s a heavy, lead-weighted word, isn’t it? And if you’re living with Hidradenitis Suppurativa, it’s a word your own mind starts to believe. But it’s a lie. It’s time we tore that label off and replaced it with one that actually fits: Resilience. Let’s talk about HS and Mental Health.
The Thousand Cuts of Chronic Illness: How HS Teaches You to Feel Like Shite
The feeling of failure with HS isn’t a single event. It’s a slow, relentless erosion of your self-esteem, administered by a thousand tiny cuts.
It starts with the internalised blame. That little voice in your head, the proper bastard, that whispers it’s your fault. Had a beer? You’ve brought this flare-up on yourself. Didn’t sleep well? You should have tried harder. It’s a corrosive shame that convinces you that you’re not just ill, you’re unclean, you’re responsible for your own misery.
Then comes the external “proof.” Every cancelled plan with your mates, every job opportunity that slips through your fingers, every time you have to rely on your mum for a dressing change or your dad for a financial bailout—each one feels like another nail in the coffin of your independence. It’s especially brutal for blokes. We’re meant to be providers, the rock, and this is a core part of the struggle with HS and masculinity.
The Turning Point: Calling Bullshit on the Scorecard
I hit a point where the weight of all that shame was suffocating. I was down, properly down, in the dark place. But then, a thought cut through the gloom: What if the scorecard everyone uses is just a load of bollocks? What if the game they want you to play is rigged against anyone whose life doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes?
So, I wrote some new rules. My rules. They’re simpler, and a hell of a lot more compassionate.
- Did you manage to get out of bed today, despite feeling like you’d been flattened by a ten-ton lorry? Winner winner, chicken dinner.
- Did you manage to make your kids laugh, even just a weak little chuckle? Parent-of-the-fucking-year win.
- Did you get through the day without completely losing your shit, even when the pain was screaming? You’re an absolute boss.
When you start to take it easy on yourself, you get to dictate how the points are totted up. And trust me, you’re scoring higher than you think.
Redefining the “Warrior Mindset”: Strength Isn’t an Absence of Weakness
We hear a lot about being an “HS Warrior,” but real strength isn’t about muscling through life pretending the pain doesn’t exist. That archetypal stiff-upper-lipped Northern hard man? That’s not strength; that’s self-harm disguised as “being a man,” an outdated legacy that does more harm than good.
Real strength is about unflinching honesty. It’s about looking your vulnerability square in the eye—the fear, the pain, the leaky bits—and still showing up.
I remember taking my youngest, Freddie, go-karting for his eighth birthday. My foot was a ravaged mess from a recent infection, my arse was on fire with two new flare-ups, and my knees felt like they were full of broken glass. Every part of me wanted to flop on the sofa and give up. But I saw the hope in his eyes, the unspoken plea: “Please, Dad. You promised!”
So I did it. I gritted my teeth, squeezed my mutated foot into a trainer, and folded my mangled body into that tiny go-kart. The pain was excruciating. But every time he lapped me, I saw the pure, incandescent joy on his face and heard him cackling with triumph. That was redefined strength. Showing up for him. That was a legacy: “He loved me enough to endure.”
Feeling this way is a heavy burden, but you are not alone in it. If the weight ever feels too much, please know there are people you can talk to. Organisations like Mind in the UK offer incredible support for mental health, free from judgment.
The world can call us failures. It can look at our empty bank accounts, our patchy work histories, our broken bodies, and write us off. But it’s not keeping the right score.
So call yourself scarred. Call yourself grumpy. Call yourself a loud-mouthed, inappropriate wanker. But don’t you dare, don’t you ever, call yourself a failure. Because you’re still here. You’re still breathing. You’re still fighting. And that, my friend, is not failure. That is a miracle of stubborn, bloody persistence. And that is everything.