Battling chronic illness is a 24/7 job. You never get a break from it. You try to do everything right; you do to your doctors, you take the medicine they give you; you do the therapy they want you to do, you exercise (if you can), eat healthy, get enough sleep, but some days try as you might, chronic illness wins. You wake up and you know it’s going to be a horrible day. You can feel it in every atom of your body and you dread it. Why? You do what you are supposed to. Why does your body, who should be on your side, betray you in such an intimate way? Because it isn’t your body and its chronic illness. Some days are just more difficult for your body to fight it and you have to allow your body the time to heal and get over the bump.
This doesn’t mean that you have to like it. You can be angry and throw things. You can curse and shake your fists at the sky and say, “Why me?” However, in the long run this does nothing to help the situation. Graceful acceptance of your body’s failings will provide more healing than fighting against it. There’s less energy wasted in acceptance, and there is a peace that fills you eventually when you realize and accept that some things are beyond your control. And as much as you’d like to have control over your own body, the chronic illness that inhabits it has more control over what is happening than you do. You have to let it go. You have to look for control elsewhere, in things like how you are taking care of your body, and what you are doing to ease your body when you are having a bad day, rather than being angry that this is happening to you.
Try and be grateful for the gifts that your illness has unknowingly given to you. For example, for me, chronic illness has given me the ability to do what I love, which is write, full time. It has allowed me to be home with my children and be there for them through a considerable portion of their lives to help them when they have needed me. And now, they help me a great deal with doctor’s visits and shuttling me around when I need to go somewhere because I can’t drive. So, while chronic illness has stolen much from my life, I have also reaped some benefits of which I am grateful for and would not have were I not sick.
Not everyone can be home with their kids. It does mean that most of the time we’ve been a one income family, but I have also made up for it in other ways. I meal plan, and make everything from scratch at home. From broth to yogurt when I am feeling up to it and have enough supplies. Sometimes I swear, I can’t keep enough mason jars in the house. I don’t know where they go off to. But I like doing the homesteading on a smaller scale because I don’t have the room to do it on a larger scale yet I’m practicing for when we go to Wisconsin and have our farm. Big dreams!
Closing off here with a reminder that you do what you can, you appreciate your body for what it gives you, you forgive your body for its’ failings and you continue to have a good life. Sometimes chronic illness wins, but it’s only one day out of 365 and even it’s more than that the good days still outweigh the bad in quality. You have to look for the positive in the everything.
I loved this image and the message it conveys. Positivity is not necessarily natural in everyone. It’s not for me. You have to train yourself to see the positive in situations. It’s not easy but as you train yourself it begins to get easier and you begin to think, “Why didn’t I see this before?”
Note from Author:
If you like what you are reading, please click the PayPal button and donate what you can. There is no amount too small and it’s rough trying to fight for disability, having medical bills to pay, kids in college and so on. I am trying to live my dream and my passion by doing what I love, and it’s the only thing I can do because I can’t work outside the home. So, if you can help it would make a world of difference in my life. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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