Sick and Sick of It

I miss the old me. I miss the me who could stand for more than three minutes, slice her own food, dance for three hours straight, and who could laugh without feeling pain. I’m letting myself say this: I really miss that girl.

 

Sadly, she’s no longer with us.

 

This is the new me: I have fibromyalgia. It has been defining me without my permission.

 

Fibromyalgia has become more than just my disease; it is my way of life. No matter where I turn, it stops me. I have to take it into consideration, because if I don’t, there are consequences. It trumps everything else in my life. I once described it to my friend as “a scared infant with serious abandonment issues”. If for even one second I manage to enjoy myself and forget it’s presence, it makes sure that I know it’s still there.

 

On August 8th, 2012, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I sat in a waiting room next to a boy with Cerebral Palsy, a smiling little girl whose mother was crying the entire time, and my mother (while my dad worked out insurance details). It was the first time the truth looked me in the face with a smug smirk. It was the first time I allowed myself to wonder what my life would look like when I walked out of the hospital. It was the first time I realized that I would never be a normal girl again.

 

Now I know that when something bad happens to a person, all they want is to go back to where they were before it happened. I think that with hardships, we tend to warp whatever was before into an amazing place we want more than anything. But was it really always that great? Ever since that fateful Wednesday, all I’ve wanted is to go back to the time before my fate was sealed. But today… today I have really felt, for the first time, that there’s no point going back. If I really wanted to go back to a time when I was happy, I would have to go back to age 7, before my family moved to other side of the world and life itself became one big hardship. Looking back, pretty much since then it’s been one thing after another… it just seems like a lot of bad stuff has been coming my way.

 

So considering that, do I really still long for what things were like before I was diagnosed? It wasn’t really all that great. Neither is now. All I can really hope for is that my future is better. I have learned not to tempt fate, never to say “from rock bottom you can only go up”, because I have discovered there are things more bottom than rocks. Like mud. And snakes. And bugs. I really don’t like bugs.

 

I can’t change my past. My attempts to change the present aren’t proving fruitful. And what do I know about my future? What if I find out that for the rest of my life I will be longing for what I have right now? I’m laughing at that thought, in the dead hollow that seems to be my inside, because why would I ever yearn for this nightmare? But who knows. I just hope I don’t.

It’s hard to express my hopes for a brighter future, because when I say them out loud to another person, the crippling thought of “what if I’m still sick? What if by that point, I can’t get out of bed?” comes back to me and I shut up.

 

But to you, I will express these. Here, on this blog, I will write down my thoughts and my hopes for the future. I love writing, and everyone has told me that I have a future in it too. I have a lot of things to say, and I have written a lot of them down. And now I have a place to post them.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask them. If you have words of encouragement, I would love to hear them. If you have judgments to pass, remember that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. I don’t need any more bullies.

Hope to here from you soon,

Be kind,

Ella

Song that’s stuck in my head and magically goes really well with what I’ve written:

“Believe I’ve got high hopes… But the world keeps spinning around.” ~High Hopes, Kodaline