I am angry today. Not in a bad mood, irritated or flaring. My temperament is actually okay. But I am just plain angry. I can't decide if its focused more on Fibromyalgia or the reaction being sick with Fibromyalgia illicits in people. I am so sick and tired of explaining explaining explaining what Fibromyalgia does to my life. How badly it has screwed everything up. How I work very hard to look and seem perfectly normal but can only do a fraction of what my healthy counterparts can do. I am so exhausted, deep inside, from what it takes to keep going. Day after day, month after month, year after year. They all roll into one after a while and differentiating them becomes difficult. Then I start to feel my life sucking into a void, a vortex, of never-ending frustrating repetition.
When I was finally given the CFS & Fibromyalgia diagnoses in 2006 I knew I had to somehow, someway, turn my type A personality into a B. The A was killing me! But first I had to figure out exactly what a type-B was, for us A's don't understand how to be successful without pushing ourselves hard. Nor do we understand not having an overwhelming need to be successful. I finally concluded A's were the doers in life and B's the thinkers. I can handle that, I thought, a thinker. And for years I channeled my A inclination into that B behavior, for it seemed the only rational way to survive with a blown-out central nervous system. I would find myself in situation after situation where I was given a choice of how to react. And I pushed myself into what I believed that B response to be. Trying with all my might to channel a modicum of laid-back, relaxed, non-catastrophic reaction. Oh it was hard! Kinda like swimming upstream. And kinda like swimming upstream I did not get very far, either.
Because I am who I am. An overachieving stress-case constantly focused on beating the competition, being the best. Its exhausting! So what I really set out to do was learn how to be me, successfully. And that is when it finally got interesting. Because I was not forcing myself into a behavior pattern I could not sustain for the rest of my life, kinda like a no-carb diet. I was instead taking each opportunity, when I felt those stirrings of stress or competition, and doing them different. Less panic, less reaction, less urgency, but still the same me. Sometimes it works for me and other times, like an addict, I seamlessly slip back into it before I even realize it. But life is nothing if not full of opportunities, even if they are to improve or do better. And I am always given one more chance to prove myself capable of this change. So today I am mad at Fibro, and how hard it makes living sick while looking well. But I am not missing out on this opportunity to take that anger and turn it into productivity. Even if that productivity is sitting and watching TV all day instead of stewing, never getting out of bed, so pissed off and angry that life has been stolen, all the while facilitating the theft.
Thanks for joining,
Leah
