Over the past few days, my stomach has started causing me problems again. Almost everything I eat leaves me feeling nauseous, and sometimes I can’t even finish a meal without wondering if I’m going to be sick.

This isn’t new. It first happened a couple of years ago, and after months of tests and appointments, a gastroenterologist finally found a treatment that made a huge difference. Thanks to that, eating slowly became something I could enjoy again instead of fear.

Now, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I’m finding myself back in the same place.

I won’t lie—it’s scared me more than I expected.

One of the strangest things illness has ever taught me is that life doesn’t always change because something extraordinary happens. Sometimes it changes because something completely ordinary disappears. For most of my life, eating was something I never even thought about. I got hungry, I ate, and then I carried on with my day. Like most healthy people, I assumed that was how life worked.

Then, almost overnight, eating stopped being automatic.

It became a question. Will this make me feel sick? Will I spend the next few hours regretting this? Is it worth trying? There were days when I wasn’t looking forward to a meal. I was scared of it. I found myself celebrating things that would have sounded ridiculous just a few months earlier: finishing a plate of food without pain, drinking a juice without nausea, feeling hungry instead of anxious.

It was such a strange experience because, while the rest of the world kept chasing promotions, bigger houses, expensive holidays and all the things we’re told success should look like, I realised that my definition of a good day had become incredibly small. Or maybe it hadn’t become smaller at all. Maybe it had simply become more honest.

Illness has a brutal way of stripping life back to its foundations. It reminds you that the things we call “small” are only small because we’ve never had to live without them. Sleeping through the night. Walking without pain. Breathing without thinking about it. Sitting down with people you love and enjoying a meal together.

I’m not grateful for being ill. I would never romanticise it. If I could erase those months, I probably would. But I am grateful for the perspective they forced me to develop, because now there are moments that genuinely make me smile that I would never have even noticed before. Finishing a meal and realising my stomach is quiet. Feeling hungry. Looking at food with excitement instead of fear.

Sometimes I wonder how many extraordinary things are hidden inside what we casually call “normal.” Maybe the greatest luxuries in life aren’t the things we dream of owning. Maybe they’re the things healthy people never even notice until one day they’re gone.