I live in a reclusive little bubble. I have very few friends, don't leave the house very often, and am not all together happy with my quality of life. Frequently my husband is the only person I see or talk to on any given day. Plenty of my seclusion is the result of my health struggles, but I would be remiss to blame it all on sickness. At this point in the game, a fair amount of it is good ol' fashioned habit. Laziness. Lack of motivation. For years I was too sick to get up of the sofa. But my health is stabilizing and my fatigue abating. This puts me in a precarious position. I have to gently dip my toes back in the waters of activity in order to not induce a relapse. But I also have to return to living life. One would think I'd be jumping up and running out the door any chance I get, but I'm not.
Nope. I'm kinda sitting here waiting for some magical spark of motivation to float in through an open window and breathe life into me. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the previous two times I managed to reclaim my life. The first time my motivation came in a pill. I was on high-dose prednisone following my strokes and couldn't sit still. Free of pain and fatigue for the first time in years, and high on having just cheated death, I started promoting my blog on facebook and getting to know a bunch of other fibro patients. People started reading it, formed a community, and I had a purpose. I sprung up out of bed every morning and crusaded all over the internet about how, together, we patients were going to change the stigma of fibromyalgia.
Unfortunately, thankfully, being high doesn't last forever. Once I tapered off that drug I was in hell. My pain and fatigue were worse than ever. I'd gained like 100 pounds. I could hardly walk up the stairs. And psychologically, well, let's just say I was so distraught the whole crusade thing fell apart. It took a few years until I found my second burst of motivation, and that one was induced with fear. Something happened in my personal life that required me to buck the hell up and take charge of my family. I was forced to get it together because my life was on the brink of falling apart. It's amazing how motivating securing your own survival can be.
The result was 2015 me. Working out at the gym, working part-time at a job, believing I owned my health and could have it all. Two measly little flus, back to back, was all it took to wipe out all my progress. Now I sit here three years later halfway between fresh-off-prednisone me and capable-of-engaging-with-the-world me. I desperately want--screw that, I need my motivation to be pure and positive this time. It has to stick. It also needs to happen like yesterday. And it kinda did happen yesterday.
I left my house again. This time it wasn't a lunch date, it was to attend my first writer's group. I've been working on a novel for the last 100 years and finally finished it. The time has come to put myself out there and launch my new career. It's scary. It's intimidating. It's also pointless to have written the darn book if I'm not going to put everything I have into making it a success. So once again I set my alarm and was up and out of the house by 11:30 a.m. This time I even drove forty-five minutes in LA traffic by myself. May not sound like a big deal, but for me it is. While I didn't present my own work this time, simply being around other people who are trying to do what I'm trying to do was exhilarating. I left the meeting feeling like a real, live girl. Today I'm back to being a heap on the sofa, but something inside me has shifted. Perhaps that spark I was looking for floated in through my car door.
Thanks for joining,
Leah
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