Toxicity is bad, in all forms.
Firstly I want to say how awesome I think everyone is doing with this horrible dis-ease. We don’t have it easy in any aspect of our lives. Every, single thing we do is a major struggle and yet none of us are giving up. We fight for ourselves, we fight to be heard, we fight to be cared for and we fight to be treated fairly and to be understood. But mostly we fight to survive every single day. And that is awesome!
Unfortunately, some people see our dis-ease as an opportunity to make themselves feel better, to use it against us, to hold us accountable for their shit. It’s not fair. And I’m sure at one time or another, we have each had this experience. Someone has used our foggy memory, our inability to speak clearly or inability to have the energy to stand up for ourselves against us. This happened to me today.
It’s made me take stock at what is going on in my life not just from a physical health perspective, but also from a mental health perspective….. And I guess from a self-worth perspective too. The person that under-minded me today by using my own dis-ease against me has been chipping at me for years, and no matter how hard I have tried to stand up for myself, I’ve never been successful at it. And it happened again today, however today something a little different happened. I was not able to stand up for myself due to not being able to communicate properly. So I stood back and noticed what was happening, noticed how this person used my inability to communicate as an opportunity to talk over me, all the while accusing me of not remembering something and not communicating properly; and saying how disappointed they are. I watched as they used my dis-ease against me.
Meanwhile I also noticed my symptoms starting to flare. My stutter went from bad to unable to communicate, my sentences written made no sense at all, my eyes went blurry and I got double vision. My head started pounding and a massive headache hit. My hands and feet started going numb, I was experiencing pins and needles in my arms and legs and I developed a tremor in my arms. And all of this all happened very, very fast.
I immediately removed myself from this conversation and tried to calm my symptoms down using mindfulness and breathing exercises. Once I had calmed, I went back through my journal and I noticed a pattern. Stressful situations and communicating with this particular person usually equalled a worse presentation in symptoms. This is not good. So after much deliberation I decided it’s time to weed out the stresses from my life, all of them. Because no matter how much I clean up my diet, add supplements or try treatments and therapies, if I have enough stress in my life that causes a flare up of symptoms, I don’t think much else will work. So it’s time to clean up my life too.
Today I am going to start a stress journal and reflect how stress and what types of stress cause my symptoms to flare and what symptoms represent in specific situations. I know the stress of flying and not be able to fly home caused symptoms to increase, exhaustion does the same. So why not emotional stress and financial stress too. I think it’s important to note all of these things so you can address your health from all angles. Especially when dealing with something like FND / CFS/ME and FM.
Anyways, that’s my thoughts for the day.
I hope you are all having a good day today. Wishing you all so much health and happiness.
xoxo