Misery Saturation

Last weekend I hit my misery threshold. I'd been surviving for two years on a steady diet of panic, fear, anger, depression, disillusionment, and good ol' fashioned misery. I found some hope in April when I drastically changed my diet, and a substantial amount of the aforementioned misery slowly started to abate. Yet still I was miserable. Perhaps part of me was used to it. I know another part of me felt justified--I am sick and grossly misunderstood, after all. Part of me was miserable because fibromyalgia makes me feel miserable. It's an unavoidable part of the illness. But the biggest part of me was miserable because, for the life of me, I couldn't grasp onto the handlebars of hope and pull myself up out of the mire. It was something I'd done before, and knowing it was possible but I wasn't capable of making it happen was making me...miserable.

When I'm miserable I turn into a real bitch. Considering I've spent twelve years battling this illness, that phenomena leaves very little doubt in my mind as to why I have such a small circle of people who have remained in my life. But that bitchiness breeds such profound feelings of guilt inside of me; that guilt is almost worse than the misery! So for the past two years I rolled like a ball down a hill, gathering rocks and stones and twigs and branches to throw into my stew of misery. Well last weekend that stew bubbled over and instead of engulfing me, it put out the fire smoldering beneath it. Overnight, my misery grew cold.

I woke up on Sunday morning done. There wasn't a single part of me that could exist for one more moment as a miserable human being. Behind me was a cesspool of misery and I knew beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that, like Lot's wife, if I so much as glanced back I was toast. Done. Sucked up in the quicksand of misery. So I stopped wallowing in the past and decided to focus on my goals regardless of how I feel. The results are ridiculous. I'm in agonizing pain from doing yoga twice this week. Exercising has also unleashed whatever "fibromyalgia" is inside of me and put me into a pretty decent flare. Setting my alarm every morning has me back to not being able to fall asleep at night. I feel awful. 

Yet I am not miserable. I feel happy and satisfied and accomplished. Putting in the work to to return to the land of the living produces terrible consequences for me. This is what I fight against trying to get my life back. This is what people don't grasp about this illness. For two years I was too sick to even try, and now the flare-cycle I've kicked myself into could last for months. Nobody knows because nobody knows what this illness is. As I increase my activity and demands on myself, it could get a lot worse. Still I must keep going. It's what I must do if I want to stop living sick. It's what I have to do and, if given the same option, what an astounding number of the healthy people who judge me could not do.

Thanks for joining,

Leah