Many years of chronic, complex  "mystery" illness have a habit of predisposing a person to developing a "spiritual"  perspective, setting them off on a journey of consciousness expansion and tireless philosophical exploration. I've come to appreciate how this has such a lot to do with all the disbelief thrown at us for experiences that are, to us, far more real, insistent and unrelenting than anything we have ever known before and yet others will doubt us, over and over again, due to a lack of conventional diagnosis criteria and an inability to frame our circumstances as easily or neatly as with some other health conditions. There is simply no explaining away much of what we experience, using such a typical framework, so here lies the growth-potential since we become the leading point of a whole new way of having to think about things. Here's an off-the-cuff list of some of the powerful gifts of having this experience.