Two Realizations as a Result of the Women of Faith Conference this Past Weekend

I went to the Women of Faith conference this weekend in Philly. It was awesome and amazing and sad. Sad because this is the last year they are having the conference as they have been doing it, with all the amazing speakers that have been a part of it.

It is always awesome and usually amazing. Every time I walk in there and sit down I take about 20 minutes to relax, to adjust to being there. Then I get this deep feeling inside that tells me, "Yes!! This is just what I needed!!"

[Two of my beautiful sisters and I at WOF this weekend (I'm on the right)]

I don't know why it continues to surprise me that there are still things that bowl me over about God, how his daughters share about God, and how we and life work, but it does. It often does. It doesn't happen with every speaker, but usually at least one or two will say something that just really sticks with me. Sometimes it's just a spark of an idea that a speaker shared which causes me to come through a lightning speed thought process to some form of enlightenment. This year it was the latter.

So, this year I realized two things about myself. And these two things are huge. So huge that I'm not sure why I never realized this about myself before now. Perhaps God needed me to get to the place where I am now to know how to be able to handle it. Maybe I will never know why it took this long. But, here I am.

When I was a girl I always wanted my superpower to be flying. I thought it would be the most awesome thing in the world! I dreamed about flying often. Sometimes in the daytime, but mostly at night. In my dreams I would soar anywhere and be able to feel the wind rushing by me. I loved it because I felt free and safe and happy. If any bad guys came into my dreams I just flew up and was safe away from them.

I've mentioned some of the issues I've had in previous posts (Feel free to read the back posts). Yet, I have really only scratched the surface and gone down a couple levels. Here, I'm going to share more that goes down into the core of who I have been and am now.

So, back to what I realized this weekend.

The first thing I realized this weekend is that my superpower isn't flying.

It's been a long time since I've been able have dreams at night that I can remember when I wake up (I can count the number on one hand for the same number of years), let alone have a dream of flying. But, even still...

No, my superpower isn't flying.

My super power is running way.

I am amazing at it. No, I excel at it! I can run so fast and far that no one can catch me. I leave them in the dust wondering what just happened.

Those that know me by now might be raising their eyebrows or laughing because I have always hated running. With a passion! But, I'm not talking about physically running away.

In regards to my fight or flight response, when it comes to people I love being hurt or mistreated in some way I will have an initial reaction of fight.

But in every other way, and especially when it comes to things about me, my immediate internal response is flight. Swiftly. Silently. Immediately.

It isn't always visible on the outside. On the outside I might seem fine. But inside I shut down. I run away inside. I run so far and fast into the core of myself that my heart can ache with the emptiness I'm leaving behind.

This affects every part of my life. It affects my relationships with my boys. It affects my relationship with my parents. It affects my relationship with my extended family. It affects my relationships with my friends. And it really affects my relationship with my husband (bet you thought I forgot him!).

Yes, running away is my super power.

But, if there is anything I excel at more than running away, it's hiding.

I am a champion hider. Always have been. I hide so well sometimes when my son Reilly is finding me that I have to give a couple clues before he figures out where I am. If people found me quickly it was because I wanted them to find me sooner.

When I hide inside it isn't a quick little jaunt. It can be days. It's more often weeks. Sometimes it's been months. And people never find me.

This is why I've been pretty silent this summer. I've been running and hiding inside.

You might make the correlation that if running inside affected my relationships that much, then hiding affects my relationships even more. And it does. With the only exception being that when things are good with me and Steve (which is most of the time) the place I feel the safest and best is in the arms of my husband. It's my favorite spot. If I had my way I'd never leave that spot, but life does insist on moving forward. And it wouldn't end up being good for me anyway because I would still be hiding.

That's how I have responded to much of life ever since I was a little girl. If you run away inside then it won't hurt as much. If you run away inside you won't feel as much. If you run away inside then you can pretend things are different than they really are. If you hide then no one can find you. If you hide then you are safe.

I'm not going to share all of how I learned to handle life this way and how it got to that point. Some of it is part of other stories that aren't mine to tell, and most of them would just take a long while to explain.

However, I can tell you how many times that this superpower backfired. Almost every time.

I still hurt, I just let myself bleed inside while I tried to ignore it. I still felt everything, but I fooled myself into thinking my emotions were gone or didn't matter. Things were never different than they really are and reality always crashed in. People may not have found me, but they also didn't know me and I desperately want to be known and accepted for me. And any illusion of safety I had was a lie.

They were ALL lies.

But the thing with lies is that they are sneaky. They often start little but gradually grow into something big.

I've been trying to be really honest with myself and others for the past 13 or so years ever since I realized how hurtful lies could be (another long story). I have thought I've been doing pretty well at it. So, you can imagine my shock and surprise at realizing that I've been telling myself big huge fat lies for most of my life and didn't recognize it!

So, the first thing I realized this weekend was that my super power isn't what I'd hoped it was, and I've been telling myself big fat lies for years.

The other thing I realized this weekend is that I've pretty much just been waiting for life to happen.

I have Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I have pain and achyness all the time (though better more recently which I'll share in another post soon). I have difficulty with normal every day things that other people hardly blink an eye at.

I am an introvert. On a scale of extroversion and introversion, with extroversion being 0 and the most introverted person ever being 10, I'm around 8.5. I might even be able to argue for 9.

I have a really active extroverted 5 and a half year old boy and a mellow but curious 6 month old boy. Most of the little energy I have is drained out of me just with taking care of them. I'm exhausted every second of the day in a deep-down-I'm-never-going-to-not-be-tired kind of way.

Since I can do little else, especially not do much of any work to earn money, I feel like I am just in a holding pattern of waiting.

I'm waiting to feel better. I'm waiting for my boys to grow older. I'm waiting to figure out more of what I want to do with my life. I'm waiting to be in a good mental space. I'm waiting to be in a good relational place. I'm just waiting and waiting and waiting.

I decided this weekend that I'm done with waiting.
I decided this weekend that I don't want to run away anymore.
I decided this weekend that I don't want to hide anymore.

I'm still trying to figure out the how. It might take a while.
Maybe I can get a new superpower some day.

Maybe some day I can fly.

Strength From Within, Part 2 - Grieving My Losses

This is the second post in my series on Strength From Within.
These steps 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!

In the first post I talk about how Dr. Oz stated that each person's body changes every 7 years on a cellular level, leaving each of us as an entirely different person. I talk about how I struggled in my different body with Fibromyalgia and what I now had to do when faced with my body being different- find strength from within, learn how to deal with the changes, and find myself all over again.

In order to find strength within me I first had to realize what I have lost. This post is about grieving my losses. 

My body is different. My body is no longer a body that can easily move about. My body is no longer going to just be able to drop myself on the ground to take a picture any place I feel like without suffering intense pain. Even playing on the floor with my boys is a struggle. My body will not be able to handle traveling for long periods of time without suffering every mile in pain with days of recovery. Just walking can be painful at times. My body is now limited.

My brain is different. My brain will no longer be able to handle intense periods of concentration without feeling like I've worked all day. My brain can't handle stress and tense periods of time very well. My brain struggles to come up with simple words sometimes (Ask my husband how many times I ask him about the thing that goes with/in/on/from the thing!). My brain so often feels clouded over as if my brain is mushy, foggy, or empty. Just thinking is difficult at times. My brain is now limited.  

These things and so many more I have had to grieve the loss of. Loss of freedom, loss of movement, loss of impulsiveness, loss of free creativity, loss of normalcy. These losses are hard losses to bear when it's an ongoing struggle day after day.

If you've gone through a grief process for loss of a loved one or another type of loss, you may be aware of the common 5 stages of grief:
Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”
Anger: “Why is this happening? Who is to blame?”
Bargaining: “Make this not happen, and in return I will ____.”
Depression: “I’m too sad to do anything.”
Acceptance: “I’m at peace with what happened.”

You may notice that these stages alternate a type of thinking with emotion: thought, emotion, thought, emotion, thought. However, not everyone goes through all of the stages or in this order. I never went through denial. The anger and depression kind of cycled back and forth. I didn't really bargain, but you can believe I prayed and prayed about it, asking God to take Fibro away, and desperately wished I could have some of these losses back. I accepted it as fact, but it took months for me to be at a place I would characterize as being at peace with having Fibromyalgia.

It's hard to let myself feel the emotions of these losses. Emotions are overwhelming to feel sometimes, and especially with these because anger and fear are two of the strongest more negative emotions. I have a post in mind just about emotions because they can be so much and so overwhelming, and (especially if you have an avoidance coping mechanism- Hello, books!!) so avoided in feeling them.

 But, I knew and know that not allowing myself to grieve these losses would just keep them bottled up and cause more emotional distress and overall stress. It is easy to only focus on the losses and become bitter or negative. It would be so easy to do that and justify it because of all the pain I am in and all the losses I've had.

It would be easy but it wouldn't be the best thing for me or my family. Being bitter and negative doesn't help me at all and only hurts me. Being bitter and negative would make me a person that would be difficult for my family to handle and they already have been impacted just by my limitations, let alone my attitude. It wouldn't let me remain a good friend to those I have, or be at all open to making new friendships when that is already difficult for me. I would pretty much just be bitchy, witchy, and twitchy all the time, and who wants to live with that?!?

Grieving these losses meant having emotional freedom and a lighter heart, a better attitude and a better life. I have needed this to move onto the next stages, have strength from within, and discover who I now am in my different body.

I do have a lighter heart after grieving these losses, but this is also an ongoing process. Every so often something will hit me again and needs to be grieved and let go. This happens less often as time goes on, but still happens. Letting go can also be difficult, but still very necessary. I will talk about this a little more in later posts!

Read Strength From Within, Part 3: Facing My Fears

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