Content warning for brief reference to suicide.

Being chronically ill has to be the funniest thing in my life. When I started a job last year, I was given a magnetic nametag to fasten to my shirt. I did it without noticing the warning on the back not to put it near pacemakers—a warning I assume the higher-ups had never considered either, because what kind of able-bodied young person has a pacemaker? An hour or so into the presentation, a muffled beeping fills the room. No one recognizes it, so we move on. And a few minutes later, beeping again. It’s coming from near me. Is it in my jacket? No, it’s literally in my body, because I put a very strong magnet right on top of my implanted defibrillator.

If this happened eight or nine years ago, I would have been mortified. Being chronically ill as a child and teenager is an incredibly alienating experience. I never told even my closest friends about it until I had to miss a week of school for surgery, instead saying that I had to go to the orthodontist for a whole day when I was really at the cardiologist—by the mid 2000’s, I guess I judged having braces as less of a social stigma. But something clicked when I was in high school when I realized that everyone my age had issues and complexities of their own, and suddenly I was managing my friends’ mental health as much or even more than my own. There was a shift in how I viewed and experienced my own chronic illness—no longer was I a victim, but a reluctant storyteller pulled along for the ride.

When I realized what the beeping was, I couldn’t stop laughing. I raised my hand, interrupting the HR manager giving the presentation and drawing everyone’s attention to myself. “Hey,” I said, brandishing the nametag, “Could I get one of these without a magnet? It set off my pacemaker.”

The HR manager was mortified. The company had run into an accessibility roadblock they had never even considered, and I had run into my first of many in my nine months at the job. She apologized, and I shrugged it off, but the tone had shifted slightly off-center for the rest of the day. Everything I saw and said was clouded by the preceding debacle, and I moved as if through a haze where everything was suddenly funny.

I tell that story like a joke, because that’s what it is. I take myself and my life seriously in the ways that matter, but I now thrive off cracking jokes that would have made my fourteen-year-old self want to shrivel up and die. It may be morbid, but it’s legitimately made my life so much better. It’s an act of physical comedy to get through the airport security line—I have to separate my mountain of electronics I tend to travel with, take off whatever massive boots I’m wearing, then ask with my nicest voice to either go through the full-body scanner or get pat down. No, I don’t want a private room, just pat me down here for the world to see. Bonus points if there’s a language barrier! It’s hilarious that I am one of the least inbred people around—my parents were born on opposite sides of the world—but I still have so many genetic problems. Did I inherit them? No, the chronic illness I have spontaneously appears in a quarter of cases—I mutated the dud gene like Magneto. I can’t even blame my parents for it! It’s all me! My luck is so bad that it’s impressive. I am a trainwreck but I’m also the spectator, and I can’t wait to see what goes wrong next—I’ll have material for my newest bit.