On guilt, ambition, and the audacity to want to build a life and future inside an uncertain body.
I woke up this morning unsure what day it was.
This happens after severe flares, when pain collapses time into something amorphous and heavy. The body goes inward. The mind follows. There is no calendar inside the fog—only sensation, pressure, ache, heat, exhaustion. Later, when the pain recedes just enough to permit thought, you piece yourself back together from fragments: the last email you remember sending, the last meal you remember eating, the faint sense that you have disappointed someone simply by disappearing.
Living with chronic pain is not only about pain. It is about guilt.
It is the guilt of the unanswered text. The missed deadline. The plan you had to cancel without a dramatic enough excuse to justify it. It is the guilt of knowing your partner, your family, your friends are quietly adjusting their expectations around you, even when they love you deeply and never say so. It is the guilt of being awake but unusable, present but unreliable, ambitious but unpredictable.
I have lived in this fog for nearly two decades. I have been diagnosed, misdiagnosed, and told—more times than I can count—that doctors simply “don’t know what’s wrong.” I live knowingly with endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and status migrainosus—conditions that medical literature now recognizes as real, debilitating, and complex, yet still poorly understood, under-researched, and often minimized, particularly when they affect women.
Endometriosis is not just “bad periods.” Fibromyalgia is not just “being sore.” Chronic migraine is not just “a headache.” These conditions involve nervous system dysregulation, inflammatory cascades, hormonal interactions, and pain processing pathways that modern medicine is only beginning to map. Even in the most respected medical institutions, treatment is often symptomatic rather than curative. Management, not resolution, is the promise. Trial and error is the plan.
What that means in practice is this: I never know what version of my body I will wake up in.
Some days, my mind is sharp and my body cooperates just enough to let me pretend I am like everyone else. On other days, my body revolts without warning—fatigue flooding my limbs, pain spiking for reasons I cannot trace, migraines flattening me into silence. There is no moral logic to it. No reward for discipline. No punishment that teaches you how to prevent the next flare.
You learn to live by observation. By tracking. By noting patterns that may or may not be real. You become both the subject and the scientist. Your life turns into a field study conducted in stolen moments of clarity.
This is where the guilt deepens.
Because we live in a culture that worships consistency. That confuses productivity with virtue. That frames success as something earned through willpower and grit, as if the body were a neutral vehicle rather than an active participant with its own agenda. When your body refuses consistency, the failure feels personal—even when you know, intellectually, that it isn’t.
But I navigate this fog in a Black woman’s body, in a country where pain is still unevenly believed, unevenly documented, and unevenly treated. Where Black women are statistically more likely to have their symptoms minimized, their pain undertreated, their expertise about their own bodies questioned or ignored. Where endurance is often expected of us, not admired. Where strength is presumed and vulnerability is penalized.
This reality shapes how stories like mine are received. The grace extended to others navigating illness is not always available here. The viral empathy, the benefit of the doubt, the soft landing for inconsistency often bypasses Black women entirely. Our suffering is frequently misread as attitude. Our limits mistaken for lack of discipline. Our fatigue framed as failure rather than consequence.
And the stakes of that minimization are very real. In the United States, Black women experience pregnancy-related death at a rate more than three times higher than white women nationwide—disparities driven by systemic inequities in care, access, and treatment. In Harris County, Texas—home to some of the largest medical institutions in the world—Black mothers faced the highest maternal mortality rate in the nation, with 83.4 deaths per 100,000 live births between 2016 and 2020, nearly four times the rate for white women in the same region. These rates are not happenstance—they are a glaring reflection of bias, resource gaps, and uneven investment in the very bodies and lives we say we cherish.
So when I falter, the cultural story is rarely generous. It does not ask what systems failed me, or what science has yet to catch up to. It asks why I couldn’t push through. Why I couldn’t perform resilience on demand. Why I couldn’t package pain in a way that felt more palatable.
This is not a complaint. It is context.
It is the environment in which ambition becomes quieter but sharper. Where care must be designed intentionally, not assumed. Where building something humane is not a branding exercise, but a survival strategy.
I am trying to run, not just a small business, but a successful business inside this reality.
That sentence alone makes people uncomfortable. Small business ownership is supposed to be a triumph narrative: hustle, grind, scale, repeat. There is no chapter in the standard playbook for “What to Do When Your Nervous System Is Unreliable.” There is no keynote panel on building a brand while rationing energy like a finite resource. There is no bestseller that begins with, First, accept that your body may betray you without notice.
But my ambition is real. My desire to build something meaningful is real. My mind, even when my body falters, remains curious, analytical, alive.
I created the Field Study tee because it named what my life already was. Because chronic illness turns living into ongoing research—education, observation, hypothesis, revision, awareness of reality. Because so many people like me are quietly doing advanced analysis just to survive the day. I wanted language for that. I wanted visibility for that labor.
I started my company not because it fit a conventional success model, but because I needed to build a structure capable of holding a life like mine. I needed the possibility of purchasing my own health insurance. I needed flexibility that traditional workplaces rarely offer. I needed an environment where disappearing for a flare would not be framed as failure, but as reality.
That may not sound like a scalable business plan. But it is an honest one.
The deeper truth is that this business was never just about me. It was about imagining a way of working—and living—that does not punish bodies for being human. Which is why I built the With Care. initiative into its foundation. Fifteen percent of profits, directed toward women-centered medical research, education, and food security.
These are not abstract causes. They are survival infrastructure.
Medical research that takes women’s pain seriously changes outcomes. Education expands possibility and resilience. Food security stabilizes lives in ways policy debates rarely acknowledge. A humane society does not ask people to perform health before deserving dignity.
I am fighting for my company because it represents an alternative logic: that care is not a weakness, that uncertainty does not negate ambition, that a life shaped by limitation can still offer something valuable to the world.
Some days, the fog wins. Some days, I lose time, momentum, confidence. Some days, I cannot remember what day it is. But I am still here. Still thinking. Still building in the margins of what my body allows.
This is not the story of overcoming illness. It is the story of living alongside it without surrendering desire. Of choosing to believe that contribution does not require perfection. Of insisting that ambition, like care, can be redesigned.
I did not inherit a world that made space for bodies like mine. I am trying—painfully, imperfectly—to leave one that does.
And if that means building something slower, stranger, and more fragile than the glossy narratives we’re sold, so be it. Fog teaches you one thing with brutal clarity: what matters is what endures when visibility disappears.
Care endures. So does the will to try.
With Care.
I didn’t start this company to chase excess, scale for the sake of scale, or replicate the extractive models that dominate our economy. I started it because I believe we can do better—and because I needed proof that another way is possible.
With Care. is a commitment to building something regenerative, not degenerative. A structure rooted in reciprocity rather than exploitation. An alternative to Fortune 1000 systems that take endlessly while offering little back—especially to the very people who sustain them.
Ambition lives here, but not the hollow kind. I’m ambitious because I believe care can be operational. Because I believe commerce can participate in healing instead of eroding it. Because I believe businesses can support medical research that takes women seriously, education that expands possibility, and food security that recognizes dignity as non-negotiable.
This isn’t about accumulation. Personally, I don’t need much. As long as I can write, read, and create, I’m steady. But this business is a gateway—an evolving proof of concept for what shared strength can look like when values guide design.
Especially now.
It is Black History Month, and this moment matters. Not as a marketing season, but as a call to participate more consciously. To support Black-owned businesses. To subscribe, share, engage, collaborate. To choose relationships—online and off—that are rooted in respect, curiosity, and care rather than consumption alone.
I am actively inviting community here: readers, customers, fellow small businesses, thinkers, builders. People who want to experiment with a healthier way forward. People who believe our money, attention, and time can help shape a more humane economy.
With Care. is not about perfection. It’s about intention backed by action. About moving forward together—stronger, more united, better resourced, and less exclusionary than what we inherited.
If you’re looking for a place that’s trying—honestly, imperfectly, and thoughtfully—to build something different, you’re already in one of the right rooms.
I don’t know how many people will read this. Fewer still may read it all the way through. But if you’re here—if you offered your time and attention—I’m deeply grateful. Engagement ebbs and flows, and this month has been quieter than most. That’s frustrating, though not surprising. Still, presence matters. Reading is an act of care. And I notice it.
Tasha Monroe
Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.