For Whom Does The Heart Tick?

When someone is ill, they often stay alive for a reason. Perhaps it’s family, a dream, a friend, but rarely, in my experience, for only themselves and the future they want.

But the heart must continue beat or tick… depending on one’s heart valve situation. However, the question remains “for whom?” What is your purpose for fighting and staying rather than giving up and fading?

Sometimes people with illness, even CVD, are used as a tool in familial or social relationships by which to promote others and their and the broader family’s virtue rather than the strength of the individual ill person. This leads to exploitation and even potentially dangerous situations in which the ill person’s illness and its severity are determined by the convenience/inconvenience and savior-persona of others rather than the reality of their own symptoms.

This can be well-meaning at first, but concern can become overbearing. However, it is when those hands that support the shoulders grip the neck in an effort to control them and the emotional toll the ill person carries, and is unfairly blamed for causing. Sometimes this is done without knowing, othertimes it is highly intentional.

Personally, growing up, I was told that I had to survive for the family and was often told that parents who lose a child were more likely to separate. I was also told that my parents were “the best mom” and “the best dad” because they kept me alive.

Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But the moment that acknowledging shortcomings becomes interpreted as a direct attack on character is when it becomes problematic.

I was speaking with my cousin recently and made repeated a lighthearted joke my mother once said, not in any hateful way, just in good, kindhearted, holiday fun.

She did not see it that way. My cousin’s face darkened, her entire demeanor shifted to heavy silence until she said, “You know you wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for her. She’s saved you more times than you know.” A distinctive judgmental frown curled her lip. An icy look in her eye.

I, the “problem by illness,” had insulted her friend, and she would defend her to the end. She would sacrifice a relationship with me in a heartbeat to preserve the mythology of her friend against the reality of my medical situation.

I was stunned.

My role in the family has always been to serve as a support system but never an actual person. A tool used to emotionally and mentally be used as a means of solidifying their marriage via exploitation of my CVD or joining in the unfairness my existence inflicts upon them due to my inability to “heal” from a critical congenital cardiovascular disease.

I existed to try to find a career and finally be “healed,” by which I could take the blame for the illness upon myself. This was hammered into me over and over throughout the years, even though the older I got and the more degreesI attained, the more ludicrous it became.

My illness and the backhanded blame I received for it were the only constants… so how could I “beat” my critical congenital illness and “be normal” as everyone wanted when it was physically and medically impossible?

This has made me an avid people pleaser for most of my life, no matter where I went or how far.

I’ve learned in 2025 that this dynamic is deeply embedded in family and social systems. When I got sicker (before recovering) a few months ago, my “best friend” of 30 years, told me she “tolerated” me and that “we were never equals” and how I “refused to heal” as if my heart condition was my fault. My family also treats me with the goalposts of a “normal” person and treats my illness and asthma as “laziness” and moral and personal failing.

That is why in 2026, I will no longer tolerate such abuse, and because of this, I look forward to a happy New Year.

My heart beats only for me.

Has anyone else experienced this or anything like this because of their chronic, congenital, or cardiac illness?

Comment below.

P.S. Are there any aspects of CVD health or pacemakers you’d like to know more about?

Feel free to email me at:

blairmueller28@gmail.com

Tune in next Wednesday and Sunday for more!

Keep ticking, everybody!

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