A year post-diagnosis, I think I'm struggling wth the process of accepting change in my career. I'm feeling a combination of loss about my lack of achievement up to now, and grief that MS has narrowed the window of opportunity to find more success in the future. Edit: I don't think I made this clear enough - I'm self-employed, so there isn't like, an HR department I can go to for help. I was a gifted young person, first in my family to go to university and went to Cambridge, all that kind of thing. I'm also very creative and strong-willed. Despite burnout and mental health issues, over the first decade after graduating I built up a "portfolio career" that included things that I did for survival alongside things that I am really proud of creatively, and things I did to support my communities. If it was just a matter of me looking at what I've done and appraising it based on my own standards, I would feel pretty good about it all. There's still a lot that I want to do, and I am approaching it differently now that I struggle due to the MS and am facing uncertainty about the future, but my determination to do interesting creative things hasn't waned. What I'm struggling with is the negative feelings that seem to come along with the choices I have made. I often feel resentful, embittered, and belittled after meeting people who started in my field at the same time I did, doing very similar things to me, and who are now highly successful. Usually they haven't even heard of me, even though my work is relevant to what they do, which brings up feelings of insignificance and deep disappointment. I feel ashamed to even admit that I feel this way, I think it sounds egotistical and gross, but I also have to believe that this isn't an unusual thing to experience. It used to be that I could look ahead and focus on the opportunities in front of me, at least some of the time. But now my opportunities seem much more constrained. I haven't been able to work full-time for a year, and I don't know whether or how I will ever get that back. I used to work 80 hours a week sometimes, to get through everything that I needed to do for my community and my own survival alongside my creative work. Now I'm fortunate that my creative work is well funded enough that I don't have to do survival work anymore, but I feel I am letting my community down frequently, and I can't work at a fast enough pace to keep up with other people in my field. Unfinished projects that I started a few years ago and still need to finish, now seem irrelevant, simply because people started doing similar things after I started, and have already got them finished and promoted them widely. I feel like I'm being left behind. The uncertainty about the future makes all of this even more challenging. Nobody can tell any of us what will happen even a week from now, let alone what we can expect from the coming years and decades. I feel I very likely have less time left to do the things I wanted to do with my career, and it also takes me much longer to do those things. On the positive side, this concentrates the mind significantly, and it has pushed me to take more creative risks because I can't play the long game anymore taking small steps toward a larger vision - I have to just try to do the big things now, and hope that the same energy comes back to me somehow. But on the negative side, it intensifies all the difficult feelings around comparing myself to others, feeling inadequate, feeling loss and grief about the person I once thought I would be compared to the person I am today, who often seems diminished and disappointing. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these feelings. I have to believe that many people experience something like this, and that it doesn't simply get worse and worse but that it changes somehow. But how am I ever going to feel okay about this? Is that hunger for recognition and acceptance just one of those feelings that you grow around as you age, so that you are increasingly numb to it even though it doesn't really go away? Do you become more sensitive to gratitude, and more attuned to the fact that everybody faces struggles even though you don't always see it? I'd really appreciate hearing from other people who have had to adapt to changes in how they see their careers, whether or not they are in creative fields. I'd like to hear how it went for you, and what has brought you solace or helped you to cope. I'd also like to hear from people who have experienced similar feelings of disappointment regarding other aspects of life. A polite request: I'm neurodivergent, and one difference I experience compared to other people is that I don't experience thoughts as voluntary actions - in particular, I can't just turn my thoughts off or stop worrying about something. When people say "you shouldn't worry about this" I often internalise this as "I'm bad or stupid for worrying about this", which makes me feel much worse. If you feel moved to offer advice like this, I would be very grateful if you could offer a reframe of the troubling thoughts, rather than just telling me to stop or reject the thoughts.