Waiting On the World to Care

This blog has sat silent for many moons. For eight full ones, more or less, I've been imprisoned in an exile of my own creation. Initially I was so angry about my health relapse I didn't know what to say, other than to hurl epic amounts of fury at my keyboard. I had no solutions, no answers, and nothing positive to contribute. So instead of spewing hate all over the permanent cloud of internet technology, I donned the hair shirt of self-flagellation and turned that anger inward. It's been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad eight months.

As I got sicker and sicker, I got madder and madder. The angrier I became, the more I sequestered myself. I refused to talk about my problems or how I felt. It seemed pointless, like it didn't matter. Nobody could do anything about it or begin to comprehend my reality. There was just me, an isolated island of misery, who wanted to do anything but talk about being an isolated island of misery. But nobody understood that either. I'm sure I still looked like a woman, but inside I felt like an alien trapped in a body that was betraying me twofold. It was both an internal betrayal, given that I felt like a permanent case of the body flu defined my every experience, and an external betrayal because, of course, I appeared to be fit as a fiddle.

I didn't really hit bottom. It was more like when a plane's landing brakes fail, and it crashes intermittently into the ground for thousands of feet until the wreckage finally loses momentum and stops. Although utterly broken and totally destroyed, still I refused to talk. Eventually denying myself the human need to process my emotions left me deeply depressed. I stopped valuing myself. I stopped believing I was worth helping or loving. Physically my fatigue had improved from the debilitating stage, but I was too emotionally paralyzed to act. Logically I knew I'd been in worse places health-wise, but my twelfth year of living with chronic illness found me so mentally broken down it didn't matter. I was weak. Unfixable. Without purpose. Exempt from enjoying life. Totally to blame for my predicament. And completely clueless as to how to improve any of it. The sorrow pouring out of me was all I could feel.

It's been a few months since I started to believe in life again, save for a few gripping spells of despair that tried to convince me I wasn't worthy. As I gain my footing and begin to clean the wreckage left inside me from the hurricane of this relapse, I'm remembering some primal truths to help me move forward. First and foremost, I am on this journey alone. Nobody is going to fix me, nor are they going to give me permission to be sick. Seeking acceptance, understanding, or compassion is an emotionally painful waste of time that derails my forward progress.

But this realization is golden! For it allows me to take responsibility for me and how I choose to respond, and that's it. I am not responsible for the way people treat me, what they expect from me, or how they react when disappointed. While I am neither to blame for being sick nor a failure for not getting better, I am responsible for taking care of myself so I can make the most out of the life I've been given. When doing so offends the expectations others have of me, it does not release me from my responsibility to take care of me. For a woman who still subconsciously believes putting my survival above the happiness of others is selfish, this is very hard.

I have a huge hole to dig myself out of. It's been a year and a half since I got that first cold that lead to those two flus that ultimately derailed years of pretty remarkable progress. But if I did it once, I can do it again. It took me remembering that while I may always be an isolated, misunderstood island, whether or not I'm miserable is completely defined by me.

Thanks for joining,

Leah