First Spark of Life

It was October of 2016. To say I was not doing well would be a monumental understatement. I was, in fact, losing it. Mind, body, and soul, I was sicker than I'd been in years. My CFS/ME was in full charge of my physical capabilities, major depression had taken over my mind, and I'd lost my faith in...everything.

My husband decided we needed to get away. He figured removing me from my environment might allow me to reset, gain some perspective, find some hope, who knows. All we both knew was I was in desperate need of serious help. But for people like me, there isn't any. Not from external forces. Any success I'd ever achieved in managing my chronic health issues came about because I found a resolve inside myself and fought like hell to get there.

We were driving up the 101 Highway toward Cambria. I was looking at Instagram. My husband had tagged me in a post. It was 2 side-by-side images of a former anorexic turned fitness competitor. He was impressed by her shocking transformation. She'd gone from a 68-pound girl who, quite frankly, hurt to look at and turned into to a sculpted and toned woman any chica I knew would've loved to look like. But it was a sentence in her caption that rocked my world:

"Life cannot compromise with death, the same way strength cannot compromise with defeat." That simple statement reminded me that I don't have the luxury of giving up. For while my fight for health may be insurmountable at times, it's still a fight I'm required to win if I want to stay alive.

My husband looked over and tears were streaming down my cheeks. For what he saw that inspired him to tag me was a girl who looked a lot better now than she did before. What I saw was a woman who had healed, in perhaps the most remarkable way imaginable. As a way to combat her eating disorder, she decided to embrace true health in every possible way: mentally, physically, and emotionally.

It'd be so nice to write about how I woke up on that fall day in 2016 and slowly but surely started to climb my way up. No, that took another year. I was severely sick, and it took quite a while longer before my physical illness settled down enough that I could begin to address what had happened to my life. Yet that day gave me the first spark that reminded me overcoming odds is not an impossibility. It's essential, in fact, if I want to continue to do this thing called living.

Thanks for joining,

Leah