The mark of surviving

This is the third day in a row that I haven’t felt well and in fact it is the worst yet. I am not inclined to be a person who goes to bed when I am not feeling well but I was fighting it this morning as that is exactly where I want to go right now and ever since I woke up. I don’t think the house being cold is helping but as I said yesterday I can’t really afford to put it on yet, so I just have to put up with that one. I feel nauseous and keep having chills, Adam asked the question that I asked myself several months ago as to am I maybe in the menopause as I have also been getting spells of sweats as well, but there is a problem in my being able to know if I am or not as I had a hysterectomy when I was about 25, I know it was young but I needed it. I have to say that I was the opposite to what most women seem to be on this subject. Personally I would say it was one or the best thing that ever happened to me! I didn’t want anymore children and was 100% sure about that, so getting rid of my periods was wonderful! I have never understood why so many women find it a really difficult thing to accept and seem to fight tooth and nail to hold onto something that is useless and annoying, if you don’t want kid, you don’t need it. This is the first time I have found any problems following the op as the monthly cycle change is what tells most women that the menopause is happening. Other than temperature control I don’t have anything else that says it is happening and it could have already have happened and be over with, who knows.

I don’t know what it is about me that is different but having my hysterectomy was as easy to accept as it was for me to accept that I am housebound or that I have MS. I wish I could work out why I accept and adjust so fast to things, the only thing I can think of was the mad childhood that I had where I had no choice but to go with the flow taught me that change isn’t always bad and horrid things happening normally lead to something better in the end, I learned how to become a survivor at an early age. It maybe just that, that I learned the tough way early, but I can actually track back further as my Mother said that I was the most content baby she ever came across, I didn’t have tantrums and I could be left on my own for hours as I would be happy with a few toys in a circle round me, I just kept going round that circle playing with each one in turn. I was apparently over content as I didn’t bother to walk until I was two and half, I clearly couldn’t see a reason to bother with it.

I have analyzed in my head often why I am the person I am, and why I haven’t reacted to the things that others seem to find hard. I don’t think that there is one thing that makes me who I am. I do believe that the starting point is that baby who didn’t find the world a frustrating place and was happy to go with things as they were. I was some how born contented and regardless what has happened I have stayed that way at heart, oddly with a good smattering or ambition and drive. Having said that I also believe that that contentment can be learned, it isn’t easy and won’t happen without changing many things in your life but contentment is a state of mind and like any state of mind it can be nurtured and built on.

Who you are when you are born is going to effect you and drive you through out your life, what happens to you will add to and change you. As an adult how you react to the harder things in life I feel strongly is something that you choose and is not just the way it is. I am an easygoing person inside and a fighter/survivor at the same time, I choose which side of me I handle a situation with and I add in what is needed to deal with it through adapting. I think we all have two sides one from birth and one that is learned, it is how we use them that is the important thing when it comes to being a true survivor and being open to changing your attitudes.

A fighter, me, why?

I have frequently heard and read in more recent months, that I am a fighter, a survive, courageous, a strong person and several others in the same line, which I personally find a little hard to accept. Firstly as they don’t sound to me, like me and secondly I don’t think I deserve such titles. We, I suppose, all never see what others see in us, as we each have an image in our minds, of exactly who we are, in body and mind. We all like to think that that is what other see, but over the years I have discovered that other never see that person.

I as most when a teenager thought that everywhere I went, everyone saw me and everyone looked and remembered. I was an arrogant little pain in the butt who thought herself beautiful and important. In my twenties I thought no one could see me and no one would even waste time looking at me, I hid behind ordinary and pulled my hair over my eyes, if I shut out the world it wouldn’t notice I was even there. My thirties found a confident, outrageous, colourful person determined to be seen, to turn the beliefs of conformity on it’s head and show myself off with a strength that was a well rehearsed act, inside was a slightly shy and awkward person. My forties I wanted to be seen as someone who was logical, knowledgeable and studious, could innovate and develop, I was more desperate to be seen as a brain rather than a person. Now strangely I find that I can’t tag myself with anything, but I see that as a really positive step.

I have found partly by age but mainly I am sure to my confinement at home, a very balanced and open person. I didn’t get here by a design or some big plan driven by reading inspirational help books or any of these things. The strongest thing I have ever done was to actually accept me as me, I accepted everything thing that I had done in my life, I recognised everything I did wrong or right and I settled in myself in me, as me, without acts or shame. Only then did I look again at where I was and how I was dealing with MS, instinctively I had worked with it and around, I had never really fought it, as fighting in exhausting and pointless, when your body can’t do something then it can’t do it, so live with it. There is one word in this paragraph that I think is the reason I am now doing what I do to help others and myself, which is the real driving force and that is instinct. Everything I do connected to my MS is done instinctively, there is no plan, no formula. I am simply doing what I do daily, from an instinct inside me, that is balanced with and by my acceptance of the things I can’t change.

I have always thought that it would be interesting to get everyone I know to write two things down for me, first they would have to swear on what ever they find most precious, that what they would write would be 100% honest. First a physical and mental description of themselves and second one of me. Dangerous possibly, interesting definitely.