Coping

Sometimes we are driving down the road of life, other times we are chained to the bumper, traveling down the road of life. Here are some of the posts I've written on surviving the hard times to make it through to the good times. Enjoy!


How to Fake Having a Real Life

You've been struggling for months-on-end, and finally it arrives! You've managed to line up a time when you're feeling good with a social event you've longed to attend. But waitaminute, how are we going to mingle? How can we talk to all these healthy people with their normal lives and accomplishments, when we're just happy we aren't verticle for once? Have no fear! In this trusty guide, I show how even if you've spent the majority of time in bed, you can fake having a real life*

* Works well for job interviews too! ;.)

Visualizing a Future You

When the present moment is filled with managing symptoms from one moment to the next, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the future may be nothing like what we're going through now. This is an exercise to overcome that tunnel vision, and it's been so helpful to me throughout the years that I also included it in my book.

It's easy to get overwhelmed and think that we're never going to get better, and it's easy to forget we have any goals beyond getting better. But if such a miracle occured suddenly tomorrow, would you be ready for your life beyond? And if you knew you would get better tomorrow, would you want to prepare for that great day? That's what the exercise entails: a way to see the importance of this time before we get well so that we can do the things we need to do so we're ready to really shine when we're healthy enough again.


When the Cards are Stacked Against You... Reshuffle

I have heard people say time and time again that they don't know how I do it. "That is entirely too much for a person to handle!" I've had one say. And yet to me... I can't give it any credit. When I get taken over by these dire health moments, it's luck and instinct. It has nothing to do with me. I'm just holding on! I'm not clever or wonderful in these moments. I'm just a living organism desperate to keep living. I believe every one of you would do just as well, if not better, in my shoes. You'd get the job done, and probably with less whining and kibitzing! I honestly wish I could shut up about all of this and just live life, but I've been unable to do so. Instead I've turned it into a blog so I can fake that all my complaining is respectable. Funny thing is, I accidently found a way to make it successful. (Sometimes it seems the only way I find success is to trip over it.)
Reprinted with permission in Fine Lines Literary Magazine


Coping Three-Part Series

Part 1: Sometimes Insecure is Perfectly Valid,
Part 2: No Such Thing as a Human Machine,
Part 3: Why Patience is a Virtue

This is a three part series, because one blog post was just too big! Seriously, though, coping is an organic process that happens over time, and it doesn't mean always getting things right. In this three part series, I investigate some of the unfair standards we often set up for ourselves and others, and how we can overcome this unjust line of thinking.

From No Such Thing...:

We're trained very early on that to be wrong is to be bad, that we made a mistake, when we saw reality wrong, it's because there is something wrong with us. Getting the "right" answer and being able to show how you got the right answer is all important from the time we start school to well after we retire. But the truth is, no one knows what reality is. We're all observing this world with fallible human organs. We want to get things right so badly. We remember our mistakes so easily. This is a primal instinct. Figuring this stuff out is how we survive.


Goddess of Never-Not-Broken


This is an absolutely wonderful piece on the Hindu Goddess of Never Not Broken: Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Bedroom Floor is a Good Idea. ~ Julie (JC) Peters. I'd never heard of this goddess before, but her name alone enticed me. She's the Goddess of that moment when everything is in flux, our past answers have failed us and we lie broken in pieces on the floor. Brilliant.









#NMAM Learning to Self-Care

Talk about who inspires you to keep trying and not give up, despite your Migraines. There's a little girl who lives inside of me, my inner child, and I have to remember her in everything I do. She came to me once in a vision. I was in a level 10 migraine, and there were some pain pills on the counter. I was refusing to take them. I was in the shower, with the water on as hot as I could stand, to counteract the pain of the migraine. My vision went white, and they came to me: an impossibly beautiful version of myself, hand-in-hand with that little girl. And the woman said to me...

"Can you explain to this little girl the amount of pain you're in right now? Would you let her go through the amount of pain that you're experiencing, right now?"

Horrified, I answered, "Of course not!!"

Perspective

This post was inspired by this little croaker, the cuban tree frog! For the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, sponsored by Wego Health. This challenge is held once a year and asks participants to write 30 blog post in 30 days. (Well, 26 actually, because they give you four days off, and— of course— as many sick days as you need. Look for posts with the hashtag #HAWMC for more. This post is about what insights I find that lead from a frog to perspective about chronic illness.

When I get angry or frustrated with something that I can't change, I'll close my eyes (usually with clinched fists too) and I'll ask myself, "Okay... what is the good in this? Where is the good in this? Find it." And I force myself to see some way in which I could turn around my thinking---see how this terrible situation could be good. It's not an easy exercise. Sometimes it will take me days to come up with an answer. Sometimes longer than that. "What else have I got? What's left?" are questions that can sometimes help me think. "How could this bee a good thing?" is straight and to the point. I try and look at whatever it is, what ever awful thing that's going on in my life that I can't control, and I try to see it as a gain instead of a loss. The second I'm able to figure that out, my heart hurts less. The world doesn't seem so dark. I can usually spot some opportunity I couldn't see before.

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