Let It R-O-L-L...

I am an uptight control freak. As much as I try to relax and let go that is just who I am. I spent years self-medicating it away, hoping if I had enough to drink or smoke or could dull the intense distraction of noticing every little thing and letting it get to me I could find peace. I now believe that behavior only served to complicate its severity. They say its the type "A" personality that get CFS & Fibromyalgia, the over-achievers, the doers, the perfectionists, the driven. I certainly fall into that category. I know now that if I had listened to my body and not pushed through CFS I would not have developed Fibromyalgia. But that is not how I was raised, that was not a society we live in and that does NOT pay the bills! I see many of you out there doubted by those you love the most that have no grasp, no concept of what you are going through. They tell you to tough it out, get up off the couch and go live your life, exercise the pain away, and it breaks my heart. I want to grab them by the shoulders for you and shake some sense into them! Fibromyalgia HURTS SO BAD AND ITS NOT JUST GOING TO GO AWAY! This is real and until it is treated it pounds the body relentlessly and soaks up every thought every minute of every day. It is a real physical condition and must be addressed or will continue to get worse.

One of the hardest lessons learned throughout my CFS & Fibromyalgia experience was how to let go, be it simple house cleaning or complicated life isues. How to let stuff roll off my back, how to not internalize stress and anger and frustration because the consequence would be immediate! I would get sick in a matter of minutes, feverish, sore throat, throbbing sinuses, aching body. There were many injustices committed against me when I was so sick that I had to let go because the ramifications on my health were so severe. There was a car accident where a man ran a stop sign and plowed into us and then lied and said WE ran the stop sign. Oh that one was hard! There was the hospital bill I was paying as much as I could afford monthly, but not as much as they wanted, and with NO WARNING WHATSOEVER one Saturday morning I got a call from a collection agency informing me they now owned the debt. After rounds of letters to the hospital, to no avail, I had to let that one go, too. There were others, work, family, life, that I had to decide to release back into the universe and trust that everything works itself out in the end. I was one sick woman and simply could not take it on and recover from this illness at the same time. 

Fibromyalgia has softened me. It has reduced my expectations and presumptions of life. It has taught me how to laugh at the absurdly painful and truly not sweat the small stuff. On my good days. It has taught me acceptance, acquiescence, compliance. Allowing what is to just be. In other words, taking that stuff that happens in life that ram-rods your spine straight against your back and sends shooting, radiating flashes of tension and stress right into your brain and letting it R-O-L-L off the slope of your curved vertabrae and drop into the ocean of "Can't do anything about that so, NEXT!". It is hard to get to that place, hard to accept you cannot do what was once accomplished with ease. Extremely hard to not be able to fight for your rights because you just get sicker. But it is completely necessary as well. As my step-mother, the most obsessive OCD clean-freak you could ever meet, told me on one of my last visits home as her 25 year union with my father dissolves in divorce, "Who cares if the house is clean if there is no one here to share it with". So as I am stretching on the living room floor this morning, looking at how badly I need to vacuum for the 12th day in a row I am laughing at myself. I am at peace with dust and dirt and have come a VERY long way, baby!

Thanks for joining,
Leah