Do I Fall Or Do I Stand Tall

I have been fearful lately. I have not been dwelling in possibility, but reacting to the present. And last night I burst into tears because I have been mentally re-creating my past, when I lived. When I was a real person with a job and friends and a life. For some reason the acute sharpness of what it felt like to be that girl smacked me across the face yesterday and made me so sad. I lamented this career that I never wanted, the last job I held that left me in constant fight-or-flight for a year and probably precipitated this bloody Fibromyalgia, was in fact my glory days. I cried to my husband that I wanted to move back to a city where people live on top of each other and were smushed into public spaces and the seekers reside. Those not content to duplicate the experience of their childhood, but search and look for a place to be themselves, no matter how extreme or odd or foreign or normal they appear. A place where I shared friendship and plans and a destination. These wide open spaces and sweeping flower studded suburban avenues I have now, its too much space for me! Too much vast room to live and explore and get lost in myself. I need to be smack-up beside society, people, the world!

Oh surely this is when faith is the hardest. Not in the beginning, when things are exciting and new, possibility  is endless. Or when that amazing opportunity has come to roost and success is pounding on my door. But it is in the middle. When that long and lonely road in-between is walked. Steady and slow, faithfully plodded. No immediate savior in front of me, but beyond that next bend in the road, certainly. I hope. And still I walk, sightless. Knowing and believing that the desires God has placed in my heart are the purpose of my existence. And walking that path with blind faith in the future while the present is sucking into a vacuum, that is when distraction taunts my vision. That is when I stumble and fall. And get all scared and worried and doubtful and negative. That is when I start turning my life upside down to try and shake out the piece that just does not fit, chronic illness. I start ripping at the fabric and tearing at the seams and trying to fashion it into a new body, new mind, whatever I need to take this away! WHAT AM I DOING TO BE SO SICK AND HOW DO I STOP IT?

Research is showing that whatever combination of trauma, genetics and infection has caused Fibromyalgia, its imprint on our brain is permanent. Our central nervous system is forever altered, morphed from normal to damaged, and not going back to factory recommended settings anytime soon. So we, as a patient body, have to learn how to do better! We have to learn how to live with this. How to manage it and re-define our life so it fits in. Not succumb to it, but master it. I have to stay on this path. The good fight, tunnel vision to the finish line nowhere near my horizon. And I will be one who walks in possibility, in the dawning of a new day. I put my guts and glory into every march for survival and revel in the win at the end of every battle. Victorious. For I believe they will one day figure out how to heal us, return those factory recommended settings to normal. But until that happens I am not throwing my life to the dogs, either.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Happy 4th of July, the good 'ol US of A!  A new blog will publish on Tuesday, July 5, 2011.