Just A Spoonful

The binary of healthy/sick is "lazy thinking", says tech innovation writer and researcher Bhavani Esapathi. The RSA Fellow and HuffPo blogger is passionate about shifting the narrative around chronic illness from "despite" to "because of". Without her severe Crohns and arthritis/spondylitis conditions, she would not be doing the exciting work she does today. Perhaps she wouldn't have travelled to Japan to accept an innovation award. Bhavani focuses on what she can do because of her chronic lifestyle. We talk about her storytelling platform 'Chronically Driven', an arm of the Invisible Labs network that she founded. For the project, Bhavani seeks out stories from people with 'invisible' illnesses, and asks them to take an unusual view of their conditions. She explains to me why being from India actually set back her diagnosis of Crohn's when she was seeing doctors in London (her current home). It is a fascinating chat and I came away uplifted, yet with many of my assumptions about chronic illness challenged.