Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

Last week we celebrated the 237th anniversary of American independence. For some odd reason a key phrase in the preamble of our constitution kept reverberating around my mind. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Actually it was more 'the pursuit of happiness' part I kept dwelling on. Like it was a foreign concept I just learned existed. With a shock of awareness I realized that's exactly what happened. Because I forgot about it. See the pursuit of happiness is a frivolous concept when your basic needs aren't met. It is only after sleep, shelter, safety and food are secured that a being can advance onto the next stages of societal engagement. Unfortunately getting horribly sick when every doctor told me I should be completely healthy violated my safety in a major way. My inability to work or care for myself threatened my procurement of shelter and food. And the illness itself robbed me of my sleep. No wonder I wasn't working towards happy, I was just trying to survive!

Yet it wasn't always like this. In fact after Fibro devastated my life I fought back hard to get the beast managed so I could begin to rebuild my existence. Sure it looked a lot different than before, but it was still good. I accepted, adapted and allowed myself to grow into my new set of circumstances. Funny thing about life, I've found, is one never knows what the next step will bring. My next step was two drastically life threatening strokes and six months of high-dose steroids to treat them. And that is where my happiness went. 

Prednisone gave me the energy and lack of pain I had pre-fibro. It was glorious! For the first week. Then "roid rages" took over and I ballooned into the Pillsbury Dough-girl. Since then I have been miserably fighting my way back to the ecstasy of that first week on legalized crack with the tunnel vision of a warrior. Or just to be who I was before I got sick. To have the same capabilities, choices and possibilities. The little taste of healthy I got undid years of therapy, acceptance and meditation. But I refuse to allow my life to be defined as a reactionary victim. I'm actually glad a day of drunken barbecues and exploding fireworks reminded me there is some much needed happiness missing from my life. Everything doesn't have to be perfect to find it again. All that really matters is I start looking.

Thanks for joining,
Leah   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back In The Saddle

Image
Well I got back on the horse. What else am I going to do? Take a long walk off a short pier or go play in traffic? So here I sit ready to try again. Raw, insecure and uncertain, but here I am. As I sort through the disillusionment in my mind I realize many of the sanity-saving tools I employed along the way got dropped in the dust a while back. I fell into my old behavior patterns. I allowed negativity and demands to infiltrate my sense of responsibility to myself. It's a big job, to regain my lost ground. I can do it, though. Not all at once, perfectly or on the first try, but it can be done. Of course this requires a significant amount of isolation and reflection. Accepting some will grumble over the selfish action of me taking care of me. Realizing that is not my problem. In fact, expecting myself to get a handle on my issues and then resume a level of interdependent living is exactly why I wound up back here in the first place.  I have finally accepted I cannot go back....
Read more

Waiting On the World to Care

Image
This blog has sat silent for many moons. For eight full ones, more or less, I've been imprisoned in an exile of my own creation. Initially I was so angry about my health relapse I didn't know what to say, other than to hurl epic amounts of fury at my keyboard. I had no solutions, no answers, and nothing positive to contribute. So instead of spewing hate all over the permanent cloud of internet technology, I donned the hair shirt of self-flagellation and turned that anger inward. It's been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad eight months. As I got sicker and sicker, I got madder and madder. The angrier I became, the more I sequestered myself. I refused to talk about my problems or how I felt. It seemed pointless, like it didn't matter. Nobody could do anything about it or begin to comprehend my reality. There was just me, an isolated island of misery, who wanted to do anything but talk about being an isolated island of misery. But nobody understood that either. I...
Read more

Incurable Fog

Image
One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school.  I wo...
Read more