For years I searched to discover its name, this world that was now home.  As a result, I learned many things about myself and people.  I learned too that it is difficult to understand your reality if it is routinely questioned or denied by others… and even yourself.

Growing up, illness was an expense, financially, physically and emotionally.  Then the only option was to “always” be healthy, to deny your discomfort, to deny your fear.  Now acceptance has become a way of life.  Acceptance of a body that becomes ill, becomes fragile, becomes older.

When I finally knew the name of my world, I gained a new perspective of myself and also the world in which I did not know I had been living.  Fibromyalgia was its name and I was one of its many inhabitants.  Some of us were better off than others.  That, however, is the nature of any world.

You fear the unknown.  You fear yourself.  You fear the isolation that seems inevitable.  Even though you share with others a common experience, yours is still unique.  It becomes an isolating world.  But solitude has its benefits.  It can force an unrealized willpower to emerge and build a future.

One that is not free of its reality, but that uses it to help you to begin experiencing happiness, experiencing love, experiencing togetherness, experiencing life. This world of illness is mine, but it does not define me.  I exist in it.  I strive to make a difference in it.  I reap the benefits of it–living.

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Two  things:  life is a profound and brief miracle, live it as well as you can.

My thoughts are with my friends and acquaintances, who within the last week have lost loved ones or feared such loss.

Until next time…

Best,

D.