This is the day to turn in your Chronic Resilience essay for our contest!! Submissions should be e-mailed to contest@chronicresilience.com. For contest prizes and rules, visit: https://chronicresilience.com/essay-contest/
I’m kicking things off by answering the contest topic myself today…
Who am I chronically resilient for?
One cold January evening in 1999 I was dancing to something wonderfully fun like Rappers Delight at my sorority house when Phillip walked in. He had recently returned from studying abroad in Austria. We were briefly introduced by mutual friend. Smile, handshake and that was it. He disappeared into the crowd, and I went back to dancing.
He told me many years later that he thought I was a “party girl.” Little did he know I couldn’t even drink due to my impaired kidney function…I just really love to dance.
For the next three years we orbited around the same social group. We both dated other people. I went to study broad in Austria. Phillip graduated.
In 2001, I was preparing to graduate myself: thinking about jobs, wrapping up my senior project and figuring out where to live. On a soggy April day I was driving through campus and spotted Phillip. He’d been visiting a friend who was working for the University and exited the admissions building just as I drove up. I stopped, he got in and we caught up. How was life after college? Where are you planning to work? That sort of stuff. This was the first one-on-one conversation we had ever had. It lasted a few splendid moments in a car, in the rain. Only a small blip. His life continued on. I graduated.
In the meantime, two of our closest friends had gotten married, and the fall after my graduation, Phillip and I both decided to tag along with them to the homecoming football game at our alma mater.
Something clicked that evening.
I knew, he knew, our friends knew. A week later he called to ask me out.
Our first date was a walk along 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. We followed that with an evening-stretching visit to Malibu beach where we sat on a lifeguard tower until 2 a.m.
We should have been having one-on-one conversations all along.
After our second date, I knew I would marry Phillip. Of course I didn’t tell him this. You never tell the guy that you “just know” you will be married. But I did know…and he did too.
We got engaged 4 months after our first date high on a cliff in Salzburg, Austria, my very favorite place in the world.
Eight months later we were standing in front of our closest friends at our wedding rehearsal dinner. Phillip handed me a gift. Definitely a frame, but of what?
The moment I opened it, I was flooded with tears. As Phillip read it out loud, my mom burst into tears. For our wedding, Phillip had made a donation to The VATER Connection, a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting and supporting families impacted by VATER Association (the rare disorder I was born with). 
The donation was Phillip’s way of accepting all of me. The scars, the back pain, the kidney issues, all of it. It was his way to tell me that he was proud of my strength and determination. Proud of my resilience. It meant so much to my mom to know that I had a husband that was going to love and accept whatever my health journey would bring.
And it has brought a lot.
Eight months after we were married we found out that it wouldn’t be safe for me to carry a pregnancy. Five years after we took our vows, we learned that I was going to need a kidney transplant. Phillip has rushed me to the ER, adjusted plans, brought me soup, let me cry, picked up medications, rubbed my back, became vegan, gone to doctor’s appointments, and in absolutely every way lived into that promise on the eve of our wedding.
Phillip is who I am chronically resilient for. He is kind, thoughtful, selfless, loving, fun, dedicated and loyal. I could not ask for better inspiration to heal, to eat well, to grow old for.
I am so very glad we started having one-on-one conversations all those years ago. xo