During the two years that I was studying for my masters degree, I would meet two of my closest friends every Sunday morning at a local coffee shop. We’d spend an hour chatting, venting, gossiping, and catching up on our lives (or lack thereof) over bagels and coffee, before the conversations would inevitably tangent off onto random topics. I miss those chats – and the insights into my friends I’d gain through them. So I thought I’d try to restart something along those lines on my blog. A chance to hear more from my readers… at first, I was trying to decide if I wanted something consistent: quotes/sayings, song lyrics, random current or pop culture events…. But I think it will be more fun, more free to mix it up. Just whatever I’m dwelling on at the moment. Hope you all have as much fun with it as I do.
I’m writing this post at 2:30am, having just returned from a friend’s birthday celebration. I should be sleeping, but I suddenly felt like writing, so here goes… Please forgive me if it’s not one of my more coherent posts..
One of the things that kept coming up in conversations (most of which I overheard rather than participated in) was the phrase “I’m so scared that…” Generally speaking this was followed by a few key phrases. Notably “that I’ll never get a job” or “that I’ll end up an old spinster.” Which instigated in my mind a recall action of all the other “I’m so scared that …” statements I’ve heard over the years. These often included worries about the death of parents. More to the point, it included worries about the speaker’s own health.
We spend all this time worrying about these things. Dreading the idea that the might happen. Worrying about what we are doing that might make those fears a reality…. How many people spend a lot of time considering what we would do if they actually DO come true? I surely didn’t, but here I am.
For those of us with chronic illnesses, one of those major fears has already come true, though. So what now? I guess there are a few options: we can wallow. we can ignore that this was a fear in the first place. or, I guess, we can embrace it. Ok, yes, I know that sounds utterly ridiculous. I mean, who embraces a worst fear come true? Well I’d be lying if I said that I have, or even if I said that I’ve been really trying to. I guess the real question is .. SHOULD I be trying to? Ignoring it doesn’t help me. Neither does pretending this was never something I was scared might happen. Still, I am determined to try to embrace what I can. Make the best of a bad situation, so to speak. Through all the pain and suffering we do learn things. We learn compassion. We learn acceptance. Many of us could probably treat a number of conditions ourselves at this point.
Here’s the real kicker though: this fear of becoming ill doesn’t stop when you are ill. Instead, the fear continues to course through you: you worry your meds aren’t the right ones, you worry about the side effects of those medications, you worry that your diagnosis is incorrect, you worry about all the impact on your life and relationships your illness will have, and most of all you fear the escalation of your illness.
At the end of the day, our situation sucks – no two ways about it. Nevertheless, we can choose to focus on the fear or we can choose not too. We might not be able to control whether or not we have an illness, but we can control how we react to having it.
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