I’ve always believed some of us feel the future before we live it.
Long before it happened, I knew I was going to be ill. Not in a hopeful way. Not in a dramatic or attention seeking way. I didn’t wish it into existence. I experienced it quietly, over and over, in my dreams.
I would dream of being unwell. Of weakness. Of my body not doing what it was meant to do. In those dreams, the feeling stayed with me long after I woke up. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was familiarity. As if my mind was rehearsing something my body hadn’t caught up to yet.
I never imagined how ill I would actually become.
Dreams have a strange way of blurring intuition and imagination. We’re taught to dismiss them, to label them as coincidence or anxiety. But sometimes they feel more like messages. Not predictions, but warnings. A way of preparing us for something we don’t yet have language for.
When the illness finally arrived, it wasn’t unfamiliar. It was heavier, more consuming, more real than anything I’d dreamed. But there was a strange recognition in it. As if some part of me had been there before.
I don’t know if this is about fate, intuition, or the body speaking before the mind listens. I just know that sometimes we sense what’s coming long before it shows itself.
And even when we can’t change the future, maybe those quiet moments of knowing are there to help us survive it.
