It’s easy to get down when you’re experiencing persistent pain: we wonder if we’ll ever feel better, and we feel alone and disconnected from the world. At its best, social media serves to connect us and inspire us, but sometimes it only makes us feel worse: we may feel jealous as we scroll through the highlights reels of our friends’ lives. We may find a community of people living experiences similar to ours, but the community gets bogged down in venting and self-pity. Some social media accounts are meant to be inspirational, but they come off as overly simple or positive to the point of denying the difficulty of reality.
Below we share our favorite Instagram accounts to follow if you want to be inspired by people who have walked the walk. Each of these accounts belongs to a person who lives or has lived with chronic pain or chronic illness, and each of them is committed to using their account to uplift their followers while being honest, as well as give practical tips for moving through life when you have pain.
