Now then, I haven’t written this looking for pity or help. It was more of a response to something that happened to me a couple of months ago that I am still trying to sort through. I apologize for the length of it but I cannot make it any shorter and still get my point across. I only hope this will help you understand a snippet of my life.
I am drifting away from everything of importance, unable to find the hard ground beneath my feet. What I once loved passionately, I now feel disconnected from, my life has become a disorganized nightmare. Passion is something that I now envy in others. I am in a state of continually trying to fix “it” and then losing all footing as I slide into another bout of failure.
And talking to friends or family about everything I go through seems out of the question for me. No one wants to hear about the same complaints over and over again. No one wants to see how selfish a person can become or moody they can be when their life is so difficult for them to separate their thoughts from. I’ve lost a good number of friends over this and so instead I say nothing and deal with my life the best I can, trying to shield my loved ones from what I go through.
My brain has a difficult time knowing what reality is anymore and I fear for what that means for my family, my friends, and my children but not myself. I know exactly where it will take me if I cannot change things – to an early grave. Not one made by my own hand but by my lack of will to continue with changes that make things better. If I make it to 50 I will be pleasantly surprised.
I know that my depression and anxiety are starting to cripple my life yet seeking help is too difficult, taking medication too taxing, and my fear of being hospitalized so severe that I won’t even go in when my body is unable to function from pain.
Fibromyalgia is ruining my life. It’s debilitating, depressing, irrational and it robs me of any chance of having a normal life. I have to deal with severe pain every day, every hour, every minute, of every day. I’m not talking about occasional muscle aches and pains, although I get those too. The pain never goes away, never, I am always in pain. It is sharp and stinging, hot and burning, dull and achy, throbbing, pulsating, making me feel tight, stiff, and constricted. It is a nagging heavy, gnawing, never-ending pain that oftentimes feels unbearable.
There are days when I must literally drag myself by my arms across the floor to get a diaper for my daughter. It takes me over half an hour to go the roughly 30 feet, as I must stop to rest my aching body on the way down the hall.
I try to hide the days that I am this bad from my husband so he will still go to work as we cannot afford for him to stay home and care for me. I stay in bed until after he is gone, as best as I can hiding the sound of pain in my voice, the tears from my eyes, and the frustration from my voice. We need the money, I am not on disability and with my health I am unable to be a reliable employee.
Yet I run my own business. Yes, a creative venture I love, it gives me an outlet in which I can be independent. In three years I have had less than 2 weeks worth of sales though. I knew it would be slow to start as I am a mother first but it would be nice to pay off the debt I have incurred getting it up and going…
It doesn’t help that I have to deal with extreme fatigue and exhaustion. It is not the sort of tired that you can rest away, resting doesn’t help. And if I can get more than four hours of uninterrupted sleep in a night, sleep doesn’t make it go away either.
On my best days, which are very few, I function at about 40 to 50 percent of normal health capacity. I get as much as I can done in these days, often overdoing it and causing the next few days or weeks to be agony.
Even talking on the phone can be exhausting for me. It is extremely stressful for me to have any scheduled appointments as I get very anxious and panicky. I don’t know if I’ll be well enough or have any energy to go to them. But if I don’t schedule them, I know I’ll forget and someone will get mad at me for being a flake once again.
I meditate, I do relaxation techniques, I pray. I take medications, I stop medications, I self medicate too. Nothing helps for long and nothing helps completely. Nothing in my life is normal. I cannot take anything I do for granted. I have to be very careful and cautious of everything that I do, if not I can make things worse. That “gentle touch” on my shoulder I got from a stranger two days ago was enough to make me cry, I can still feel pressure from where it felt like they shoved me.
And this is just from my depression, anxiety and part of the fibromyalgia symptoms. There is other stuff going on in my life that I don’t have diagnosis for. Things that only the closest of my friends know, things I don’t even tell my family about as they don’t need another thing to worry about when it comes to me and my life.
Prehaps one day I will be able to feel like myself again, prehaps one day I will have the courage to get the help I need and stick to it. Prehaps one day there will be a cure for what ails me. But for now I must just keep going on, trying to be as positive and strong as I can.