The Dichotomy of Me

I did something when I created the protagonist and mentor characters in my novel, something I just gained incredible insight into. I gave you a woman who has triumphed over unfathomable hardship and prevailed, and a girl who thinks the worst is behind her but has no clue how hard life can get. And it was while walking my dogs this morning that I realized this illness is precisely how I was able to accomplish that. See right now I'm the girl--only I'm midway through my journey into "how hard life can get." So how I was able to create a character who's triumphed over jack squat is a total mystery to me, considering I feel as successful as a cyclone in keeping my life together.

That's when I thanked fibro. See those brief moments of triumph I spent years working toward fueled my mentor character into existence. Would I have truly grasped her sacrifice, her dedicated efforts to keep going on her own terms, and her relentless determination to succeed, if I myself hadn't been successful? At least a little bit? With something? On the other hand, without those endless years of unending misery, could I have even remotely captured what it's like to have your life smashed to smithereens over and over and over again? I think not.

I'm laughing my ass off right about now. See, back when I was doing really well--exercising four days a week and sleeping every night--I worried I wasn't going to do my protagonist justice. Life had been a nightmare for a really long while, but that time had passed, thank God, and I was feeling so capable and confident. The better I did, the more of a distant memory my own personal hell became. Of course the infamous fibromyalgia flare-up gave me little tidbits of a reminder every so often. But as we all know, being sick for a few weeks and a few years are completely different states of being.

The silver linings of life are hard to find sometimes. Right now I'm really struggling. But I've been really struggling for so long now, seems like I would just accept it as status quo and move on. Clearly that ain't gonna happen. So onward and forward we go. Still believing one day I will stop being the flippin' protagonist, and once and for all become the woman who has triumphed over unfathomable hardship--and prevailed.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

The Drug Dance

I'm stumbling around like a zombie who feels like she's on the verge of getting the flu. That's what I feel like--a sick zombie. Lucky flippin' me. Somehow in the middle of my brain-stem driven level of functioning, I realized I have to sleep or I cannot exist. It's that simple, and that dramatic. Otherwise I feel so awful, riddled with anxiety and such severe pain, all I can do is drink to escape my misery. Needless to say, the after affects of a bottle of Burgundy only further serve to enhance my zombie-like, anxiety-riddled state. So I am now back to drugging myself to sleep. And the dance begins...

To medicate or not to medicate is an overwhelmingly controversial topic. Not enough, and functioning isn't possible. Too much, and functioning isn't possible. Then there's that whole "two strokes as a side-effect of a very popular antidepressant" thing I went through six years ago. So needless to say, I try and medicate as little as humanly possible. But the bottom line is what this illness does to my body makes me want to die, physically and emotionally. I found a way to mitigate such a dire reaction by completely changing my lifestyle. After years of prep work, my fibromyalgia salvation came in the form of green juice and dumbbells.

But today the flu-ish zombie writing this is so many miles away from the capable woman who managed her illness with holistic lifestyle dedication, I'm struggling to figure out where I am. No, I'm nowhere as bad off as I was in 2011--when I was 100 lbs. overweight, in so much pain I couldn't walk down a flight of stairs, and shattered from six months of high-dose prednisone, but I ain't squatting 95 lbs. either. So here I sit at square three or four, admitting I'm sicker than any one thing will fix, and putting my faith back in that tenuous combination of kale juice and pharmaceuticals. All in an attempt to try and find my footing on the path to traversing year eleven with the fibro beast eternally on my back.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

Where to Begin

I feel like a ship floating out at sea. I exist but don't belong. Nor do I know where I belong, or where on earth I've been. The only thing I know is I've been here before. On a vast, void-less planet lacking shape, clarity, or direction. Land and sea have not been separated yet. Once again I exist, but I don't belong.

Picking up the pieces of my life is proving a much harder task than I thought it would. At first I just thought I needed to sleep for a few weeks and would get right back on track. Then fibromyalgia laughed in my face once again. It's taken me a few weeks to even start sleeping at all. I keep thinking about the woman I was before I went back to work last March. In the skewed hindsight of my memory she was a happy girl who had her health managed and was living a pretty productive life. But knowing me, I was bitching about the same things I'm all bent out of shape about now; I was just in a lot less pain and exercising a lot more.

That's when I was reminded fibromyalgia didn't just make me sick, it made my life sick. And that's what I'm hung up on-- asking myself the "whys" of life. Basically, why the hell is this my life? But experience has taught me "why" questions are a dead-end road. A pointless waste of time. Who cares why? What is, is. Quit trying to figure out why shit went wrong and get busy trying to fix it. But I'm too sick right now to fix much of anything, leaving me to sit here stewing over everything I should have become, but didn't. Which is why I feel like a ship floating out at sea. I don't even see land, let alone know how to reach it.

Thanks for joining,

Leah       

Freedom from Crazy

Yesterday I almost lost my resolve to stop emotionally reacting to my health, circumstances, and life. I had an extremely painful infected cyst on my back I had to have drained by a surgeon. Then I got a cold. And having slacked off so much on my exercise while completing my commitment to gainful employment left my muscles tight, sore, aching, and all together screaming in pain. And have I ever mentioned I suffer from insomnia? Being this sick for this long makes me crazy. I try so hard to not let it, but am really just one woman being swept into a sea of afflictions and am sometimes just not that strong.

And it's okay. I don't have to be strong all the time. In fact, as long as I don't sabotage myself in reaction, the whole experience is really quite human. Quite normal. And quite possibly one of my biggest triggers. See, I spent years furious with myself for getting so bent out of shape over 1) how sick I was and 2) what that sickness was doing to my life. So once again it was my reaction, not my reality, that made things worse. But did I really just expect myself, starting at the age of 28, to gracefully lose my ability to live my life, earn a living, and engage with the world-- with nary a care of concern? Come on now, that's just not the way people are built! Especially me.

I'm in my eleventh year of living with chronic illness and have finally found an acceptance that has evaded me until this point. It's made me realize acceptance is freedom. Freedom from having to be different (not sick), freedom from living up to the expectations of others (give them love and a smile, not a commitment to host Thanksgiving dinner), freedom from believing I could have handled any of the previous ten years any better. And freedom is, most of all, the ability to move forward without giving into the crazy. So I guess, seeing as I wanted to give into my errant emotions but instead redirected my focus on organizing my Tupperware lids, mission accomplished.

Thanks for joining,

Leah          

Incurable Fog

One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school. 

I worked really hard for that A. I'd get up at 7 AM to study, regardless of how poor my sleep quality was the night before, determined to prove I was still a viable human specimen. All that learning made interesting things start happening to me, like I could listen to music again and started to remember why I walked into a room. It was an incredibly liberating experience. I'd far surpassed the "no treatment no cure" diagnosis I was given in 2006, but never expected to get my brain back. In hindsight this was like a cruel teaser. Because little did I know, I was about to lose it again. 

By the time Spanish 2 rolled around the following semester, I was a double stroke survivor. I attended one session and promptly dropped the class, considering my brain was such mush I couldn't even make my mouth say ¡Hola! I even tried Conversational Spanish the semester after that but was still too screwed up. Getting my brain back after my strokes took a lot of time to heal and, once again, demanding an excessive amount of mental prowess from myself in order to write my book. But imagine how differently the next six years would've gone if I hadn't succeeded in my little Spanish 1 experiment. Perhaps knowing I could take a perceived limitation and put in enough work to triumph over my tribulations gave me the will to keep going, even when everything was at its worst? All I know is I was told to accept my illness, so I decided to challenge it. That attitude has gotten me into plenty of trouble over the years. I'm always pushing myself and overdoing it and crashing and burning. But I've also come leaps and bounds from that poor sick girl in 2006 who was told she was never going to get better. While I may not be "better," through one challenge at a time, my life certainly is.  

Thanks for joining,

Leah 

Reboot Pain

Man do I hurt. I haven't been exercising and it's really starting to take a toll, proving to me once again that moving my body is the best pain pill I've found. As my immune system tanked, so did my ability to engage in cardiovascular activities. When I was in the worst of that two-month-long monster flare, my mile-and-a-half morning walk with my dogs turned into a pathetic shuffle around the block. Coupled with the fact that the gym hasn't seen my sorry ass since November, it's no wonder I freaked out and quit my job. Since I'm still knee deep in survival mode, I'm not even really doing yoga. It's all I can do to fulfill the completion of my obligation at work, so I've been put on hold. And man do I hurt. 

Not to mention I've gained ten pounds back. That alone would seemingly send me running to the weight room to bicep curl myself back into my former shape. But I'm not. Then I finally realized I'm so darn terrified of getting that sick again, I'm babying myself. What a delicate balance, this living with chronic illness thing. I have to challenge myself just enough to slowly move my life back toward health, but too much "challenge" sends me flying down the tunnel of unending sickness. For flippin' reals, yo?

So I'm putting down my computer and doing my Namaste Yoga DVD. It's gentle, yet very effective, but given my pain-seeped state is going to hurt like hell. Tomorrow it will hurt a little less, and in the next couple weeks I will hopefully be geared up to go slap around some iron with a bunch of over-inflated muscle heads. It took me two years of yoga to even get back to the gym, and two years of intense cardio weightlifting to get to where I was, but the benefit of having done all that work is a relatively quick recovery. If I start now, don't overdo it, and for the love of all things holy, can somehow avoid another monster flare.

Thanks for joining,

Leah