Lucy's Dreams for Life

Life begins with hopes and dreams, yet unexpected challenges, such as a chronic health condition, can intervene. Lucy shares how living with Marfan syndrome has disrupted and reshaped, but never diminished, her determination and dreams.

I recently sat down with a pen and paper to draw a mandala flower. I expected it to be a quiet, meditative exercise- shaping each petal, layering detail upon detail, watching something beautiful emerge.

But halfway through, I stopped.

I looked down at the unfinished flower, and a realisation washed over me: this half-drawn mandala wasn’t just a drawing. It was me.

Living with Marfan syndrome and chronic illness often feels like this—like being a flower that never fully blooms. There are petals missing, spaces left blank, lines that never get drawn. When I was younger, I had dreams of what my life might look like, of who I might become. I imagined careers, adventures, experiences. I pictured a full flower, each petal opening one after the other until the picture was complete.

But illness has a way of halting that process. My body, fragile in ways most people will never see, has drawn limits around what I can do. It interrupts, it pauses, it dictates. And so the flower remains unfinished. I remain unfinished.

That realisation can be painful. It carries a grief that is hard to put into words-the grief of lost futures, of dreams left unfulfilled. To admit that I may never become all I once hoped for is to confront a kind of loss that isn’t visible to the outside world.

And yet, as I looked at my half-drawn flower, I saw something else, too. Even incomplete, it had beauty. Even unfinished, it carried meaning. Its story wasn’t erased by its missing petals, it was defined by them.

Maybe that’s true of me as well. Maybe my life, though shaped and limited by chronic illness, is still art in its own right. Maybe it doesn’t need to be complete in the traditional sense to matter.

The half-drawn flower is a reminder: I may never be what I once dreamed, but I am still here. Still growing in my own way. Still creating something worth noticing. And perhaps, unfinished doesn’t mean broken. Perhaps unfinished can still be beautiful.