Strength From Within, Part 1 - New Body, New Self

I once heard Dr. Oz give a commencement address. He was interesting to listen to and very engaging. I have a few vague ideas as to what else he said during the address (I was distracted trying to find a particular graduate amidst all the others!), but one section was very clear. He stated that everyone's cellular structure changes every seven years.

[Doesn't this look like a beautiful collection of various flowery and plant items? 

Nope! These are some of the cells in your body on a microscopic level!]

So, every seven years you are an entirely new person with new taste buds (ever find yourself suddenly liking or disliking how something tasted that you hadn't before?), new lungs, new heart, new eyes, and new ears, among the rest of you. There are some aspects about this that I'm not sure how it works, such as those needing transplants. However, as he's a widely renowned and respected doctor (and I'm not), I'm willing to trust he knows what he's talking about. :) Perhaps, rather than using the word new we should use the word different. We have an entirely different body.

During my teen years I had pretty bad asthma. Shortly after I went away to college, though, it went away enough where I could go places without feeling like leaving my inhaler in my room was a risk. I knew my body was different, but I didn't know why! This was my 21st year, though, so perhaps I now have an answer for that!

My mental, emotional, and physical states were also different than they had been. I thought about things differently, felt things a little differently, and felt physically better than I had in years (I have had back pain since my teen years but it wasn't as bad around this time and stayed mild until my Fibro flared up). So, you would think I would be used to having a body that changed. However, these are relatively normal life changes.

In my Fibro Story post I wrote, "There is nothing worse than waking up one day feeling awful and, as time goes on, realizing that your body has betrayed you. " And later, "I began feeling trapped in my body and wanted desperately to either have my body work properly and let me feel right, or to not be in my body anymore." I felt like my body was different and would never be the same again, but this wasn't a positive change. This was change in a really negative way.

I recently watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy again with my husband. At the end of the last movie Frodo asks this... "How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend... some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold." He says this right before going on a trip that would redefine him and his place in the world as it now was- a new life.

I thought, How perfect is this?!? What came before is your old life. Everything that happened, that changed in your body, that changed in your heart and mind, has changed who you are... there is no going back. Frodo was physically, mentally, and emotionally damaged, and deeply changed in such a way that he would never be the same again. He had a hard time coming to terms with how these changes and damages affected him. It is the same for Fibromyalgia.

So, what do you do once you realize you now have a body that is so different than it had been before that there is no going back and everything will be different from now on? For me, I have had to learn how to deal with it, find strength from within me, and discover myself all over again.

Through the next several posts I will describe steps I've had to take, and areas in my life I've had to assess and change, in order to get to where I could start living my new life in my changed body rather than merely enduring and existing.

I warn you now that few of these steps are easier, and more of these steps are hard and scary. But, they have all been necessary to living a better life- one filled with hope and being able to enjoy my family and friends more than I've been able to in the past. It's not all sunflowers, puppies, and roses now (I still have all my symptoms of Fibro and still struggle with depression, after all! Besides, I'm allergic to puppies.), but that weight of depression, and the inner turmoil of Fibromyalgia has lessened through following these steps.

I won't phrase these steps in terms of what you can do, though you can certainly decide to follow these steps on your own. These are what I have had to do, and continue to do in some ways day after day. I hope you will be encouraged if you determine that you need to do some of these steps yourself!

Read Strength From Within, Part 2: Grieving My Losses