One of the things that's hard to cope with is this. I can't just go ahead and decide that I'm going to do something, because it's something I'm supposed to be doing, and then force myself to do it.
It used to be, pretty much no matter what, I could force myself to get things done. This eroded somewhat when I got fibro, but it was still there. I could just... force myself. The necessary parts would arrive, and take over, and then I would have things done.
Okay, so maybe it caused some problems. I do suspect that this tendency was a contributing factor in getting the fatigue with fibro. I still remember my senior year of college, having the sensation that I was sucking the last dregs of energy out of my bones, just to make it through all of the things I was doing.
But there's the other side, that reliability, the assurance that, no matter how impossible something seemed, somehow, I would manage to make it happen. Not literally impossible things, obviously. Just... things. Things like getting up and going to classes two days after an unsuccessful attempt to off myself. Things like carrying five classes and three jobs that semester, coming out of it with a decent, if not excellent, gpa. Things like walking for miles on a broken foot (more than once, with different broken feet).
One of the hardest things to accept lately is that I can't seem to make this happen. Perhaps it's that I no longer have the absolute necessity. Somewhere in my brain, I seem to have figured out that, little as I may like it, I will not disintegrate or be destroyed if I don't accomplish the things I would prefer.
But the guilt and shame pound against me almost constantly. I hear the voices berating me for being a worthless, lazy, good-for-nothing failure. And no matter how much I try to remember that they're not right, it's still hard.
I'm working on it. I'm working on being ok with doing less than I would prefer. I'm working on being ok with taking things slowly, allowing them to happen rather than to seem to happen. And I'm trying to accept that healing is more than knowing what the right answers are and forcing myself to say them regardless of how I feel. But it's hard.
--Cleo
Friday, March 16, 2007
Accepting
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1 comment:
Thanks, and sorry it took me a while to reply. You're right. Much of the distress is because I would prefer to continue to be high-functioning. In part, that's just because I took (take) pride in that. And in perhaps even a larger part, it's because that's how I expect to keep from being rejected.
That said, I'm also getting a strong sense that the process of maintaining a high level of function contributed to me not being able to figure out how to get better, because the really high-functioning parts get in the way of that. So it's a process.
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