I used to write, kind of a lot, actually.
I wrote this little poem I wrote back in 2019, when my MS diagnosis was being contested. It was a crazy time of me trying to figure out the changes I needed to make in my life. At the time, I was really struggling with the idea that my life was looking like it would never get to the place I once thought it would.
Not to say that I'm not happy with my life, just that things are far different than I imagined. There's this weird sort of grief that comes with chronic illness/pain. You have to grieve the life you thought you would have, the things you hoped to do. I needed to go through all the steps of grieving the life that I once pictured for myself, and honestly, even after the almost 10 years of this journey, I'm still working on it.
I don't think grief over a diagnosis or an onset of chronic pain/illness is a journey that ever stops. I spend hours upon hours every week thinking things like, "once I'm better I can do XYZ." or, "if I didn't have this pain I could still do XYZ." or, "I would still be doing XYZ if this never happened to me."
But those thoughts are scary ones to keep around for too long - they don't do any good. A million different things could have gone right or wrong, and still there would be what-if's to think about.
So rather than spiral on those thoughts, I do what I can to focus on my new life and new limitations and new circumstances. That's what this poem is about. It's not that I've gotten to that place, but that I know I need to be there and that's where I'm headed.
I recognize that my life has changed. The way I pictured my life when I was in high school and starting college is not even close to where my life is now. And I guess that's probably true to most people, but it feels different with the lack of control I seem to have over the situation.
I can control things like my mindset, my reaction to new or old information, I can work on small things, but at the end of the day, there just simply are limitations in my life that I can't work around.
But having limitations in life doesn't mean my life is limited.
Sure, things are different. Maybe I have to accommodate a little more for certain things than others do, but who cares? Who cares if my workouts are nothing more than yoga or a walk rather than go to the gym 7 days a week? Who cares if I have to work from home for probably the rest of my life? Who cares if I need to avoid certain things or change other things?
At the end of the day, in the grand scheme of this life, those things really aren't that big of a deal. In general, most things that we get hung up aren't as big as we let them seem. It's all just a matter of looking at it all a bit differently.
See, this whole health journey has done some weird stuff to me - it's made me change in ways I wasn't expecting, it's altered my mindset in a lot of ways, and somehow, it's made me really self centered.
I get caught up in these cycles with thoughts going through my mind like, "everyone else gets to live their life exactly how they want but I can't," and, "no one else has the limitations that I do." and a million other similar thoughts.
But the reality is that every single person has their own journey, their own "limitations". Some people have to alter what they do because of their job, or finances, or because they are responsible for others, or school, or any number of things.
I often feel as if no one else has ever had to make the adjustments that I have. So many things about my experience has been extremely singular - doctors can't figure it out, most of them have never seen someone that has what I have going on, it really feels like I'm 1 in 8 billion, and not in a good way - but that doesn't mean that hundreds of thousands of people can't relate to some part or another.
And that's the difference, is simply shifting the mindset and vision just enough to see that I am absolutely not alone in what I deal with, at least not every part of it.
It's so easy to get caught up in the negative side of change. To focus solely on what I have to let go of, or what I can no longer do.
But that change is the same change that brought be back home to Michigan, helped my relationship with my family grow as I've learned to lean on them, it showed me different hobbies that I've learned to love, it showed me how to slow down and listen to myself and my body and my needs, it's allowed me to experience a whole myriad of different things.
And all of those things lead to even more positive changes and so on.
Because, as I said, just because my beehive got knocked down and my whole world has had to change and shift because of it, doesn't mean that I can't take that and turn it into something I love even more than what I had before.
I guess at the end of this all, I want to leave you with two reminders.
First is that just because things are different doesn't mean that things are bad or wrong. Change doesn't mean the end. Adaptability is how every one of us gets through this life. We see change coming our way (or we get smacked in the face with it out of nowhere), and we adapt and make room for it. We adjust. That's what this life is all about. In a cliche way, we just need to roll with the punches.
Second is that no matter how destroyed you feel, how derailed you seem to be, you can always come back from it. Maybe not to the same place you were once at, but you can find a new normal for yourself at any time.
There is going to be heartache and change and disruption throughout your entire life, that isn't going to change, and you'll never have much control over that fact. At the end of the day, the only part that you really have control over is how to deal with it, how you let it affect you, and how you come out of it.
Simply giving up and deciding your life is awful now is the easy thing do to, but if you do that, your beehive will stay smashed on the ground forever. Taking control of your reaction and rolling with the punches, deciding that you can make something great out of circumstances you never thought you would be handed, that's how you come out on top.
It's hard. I struggle with it so often. But I'm a firm believer that if you can pull out the little positives, you'll look back after a while and see that each little step has taken you miles down the path towards peace and contentment.