We Made Friends!

This weekend while my husband and I were lying at the pool we met another couple. Around our age, good people and both of them were actually interesting on their own. The dating stage of couple friendships is funny. Its extremely rare to find a good match, all around. Often I find his friends girlfriends are very young and I know he finds my friends boyfriends very dull. Plus with all my ailments I would assume I am an odd person to get to know. So how do I do it? How do I present myself to this woman that has 3 jobs and more energy than the Energizer bunny? My husband and I are home-bodies. Not so much by choice but more a matter of circumstance. I am sick and we are broke. We watch a lot of TV and hang out with our dogs. Maybe venture out to get a yogurt, coffee, the dog park or our all around good time Friday date night at Costco. An afternoon lying at the pool. And that is about as exciting as it gets. But for some reason they were drawn to us and I found myself cautious to reveal too much about my reality, my limited life, my illness.

See the strokes are so much easier to talk about than Fibromyalgia. They are legitimate and understood. Like cancer, when you tell someone they comprehend the severity of the words you are saying. But with Fibromyalgia we are lucky if someone has even heard of it, let alone knows anything about it. Yet it is what rules my life, structures my time, absorbs my existence. For watching this woman bound around with endless energy reminded me how much I have lost. I was like that once upon a time, too. So as the weekend progressed my oddities sprouted bigger and bigger branches. My chemical-fobia organic-sunscreen sun-worshiping don't drink much alcohol because I am on medication-self revealed herself. And I realized I must come off like a total nut! With all my strange ideas about health and wellness, how the refined, processed, carb-heavy food-guide pyramid of the 80's is what has made our country fat, how I scoured the racks in the grocery bakery until I found hamburger buns with no High Fructose Corn Syrup, my known nemesis. Oh and how the now-recommended eating style of 5 small meals a day is just the establishment's scamming way to correct themselves of the debauchery that was that food-guide pyramid, decades later. Yeah, even to myself I sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

And my mind went to an RSS feed my blog is linked to. The emails I get from them are right in that vein. Emails about UFO's or the government injecting monkeys with ebola or nuclear missiles ready to attack from some mid-east country or another. Slowly it dawns on me that I am indeed that paranoid conspiracy theorist! That is probably why they contacted me to link up! Because I am running around shouting to every computer that stumbles on my blog or support site on facebook a very controversial point of view, that Fibromyalgia is a legitimate disease with a specific cause, though it remains yet undiscovered. And enough people agree with me on that fundamental fact and have hit this blog or The Fibromyalgia Crusade or The Fibromyalgia Fun House so that I am garnering a wee bit of attention. Well, good! I am proud to be a paranoid informed conspiracy theorist with evidence to back up my claims that has managed somehow to rid myself of the most debilitating part of this illness. Link me all you want, wherever you want. I am proud of the publicity. I am proud to spread awareness. But when I bring it back home to my personal life it is so complex. How do I say it? How do I tell a new and potential friend I just can't do what everyone else can?

Thanks for joining,

Leah