Fighting the Unpleasant Bits

I know I've mentioned before that I follow a page on Facebook called Positive Living with MS, run by a woman named Penelope Conway. You can read her bio here.

She always posts great stuff, and the other day was no exception. She was talking about how MS is different every day, and how it's okay to have a meltdown now and again. But she said something else that really resonated with me. She wrote it more beautifully than I could, so I'll just quote her.

“... It’s okay to have a meltdown from time to time. It’s okay to feel. It’s okay to cry, scream, rant, or vent about MS. Think about it…you are living with a disease that is slowly eating away at your insides. You are going to have tough days.

Denial isn’t the answer to getting through a life with MS. It’s actually not the answer to getting through anything in life. What gets you through is facing the reality of what is happening and choosing to work through every crazy emotion that comes to the surface; every fear, doubt, hurt, pain, and heartbreak.

Where positivity comes in is not in helping you to pretend that MS doesn’t affect you. Positivity helps you to face MS head on by giving you strength to keep going. When you are able to make it through a day of tears yet still find a smile in your day, not because you are hiding from what’s happening but because it’s the only thing pushing you through to tomorrow, that’s the strength I’m talking about...”

You can read the whole text here, in case you don't use Facebook.

I guess that's what I mean when I say that I choose to be Pollyanna; when I always try to look at the bright side. It's not that I don't acknowledge the bad or unpleasant bits; it's just that I choose not to let the unpleasant bits take over for very long.

When you have an illness that is never going to go away, any chronic illness, I don't think it's possible to deny having it, as much as we'd like to. I think the only thing you can do (at least the only thing I can do) is to accept (not embrace) your limitations, your fatigue, your pain, your cog fog, and the rest of your symptoms, and work around them the best you can. Try to find your normal, because it's probably different every day.

I've said it before, there are days when I feel like I could take on the world, and there are days when I have trouble making coffee. For me, it will always be like this. Every day, I fight against the fatigue, the cog fog, the balance issues, the pain, the tingling, the eye problems, and all the other unpleasant bits that I go through. I fight because that's my nature. I fight to remain positive. I fight so I can be the mom my kids think they have. I fight so that I can truthfully say that I have MS, but MS doesn't have me.

I find my normal. I may not like the normal I have today, but it will probably be different tomorrow anyway, so I've got that going for me which is nice.