Читать книгу The Marvelous Transformation - Emily A. Filmore - Страница 12
ОглавлениеPigtails and Knobby Knees: Learning to Overcome
Take Stock of Where You Are Now
Transformations often begin with a radical decision. Answer the following questions about life-changing decisions in your journal.
1. Name a time when you changed a habit or trait that no longer served you.
2. What did you do to change the habit or trait?
3. How did you feel about the decision?
4. What was the experience of change like (easy or difficult) once you made the decision?
5. What parts of your life have been altered due to your health?
6. Describe any tough decisions you’ve had to make to change your chosen path. How do you feel about those decisions?
7. If there were another area in your life in which you could make a powerful, path-altering decision, what would it be? How do you feel when you think about making that change?
The Wonderful Pieces of Divinity I Have Found
You are stronger than you know, even if you have to dig deep to find it.
•
You can do anything you put your mind to.
•
Be grateful for the life you have.
•
Having autoimmunity helps you slow down.
This is a good thing.
•
Money isn’t everything.
•
Your planned career may not have been your life purpose; find your path by listening to life as it presents itself.
I was that awkward, shy, creative, pigtailed girl with her nose stuck in a book on the playground. The middle of three kids, I was quiet and didn’t really understand other people’s jokes. I tried to be nice to everyone and while I wanted to have a lot of friends, whenever I found myself in a crowd of kids I just wanted to be left alone. The only place I felt truly comfortable was with my family. This shyness would play a huge role in my ability to manage my health later in life.
Mom stayed home and chauffeured the three of us around, as mothers do, until she became a teacher when I was in third grade. She liked to sew a lot. She enjoyed decorating and sewing, making some of our clothes and all of our Halloween costumes. We could dress up as whomever and whatever we wanted: a mermaid, a bride, a pumpkin, you name it. Today I love making my own daughter’s Halloween costumes, thanks to those wonderful memories.
Dad worked in construction and would smell of sweat and bitter asphalt when he came home. We had a few dogs over the years and an above-ground swimming pool with a wooden deck that my dad and some neighbors built with their own hands and, likely, a few beers. Dad always had some home improvement project going on, including once cutting a hole in the ceiling to relocate our bedrooms in the attic; five years later we finally moved into those new rooms. My parents still can’t agree on whose ideas the home construction projects were, but suffice it to say our life was a constant adventure.
Mom and Dad worked hard to give us what we needed, and we had a fun-filled childhood. We played games, rode bikes, and had movie nights. We knew we were loved; we never doubted that, ever.
My grandparents lived one block from my school, so I saw my grandma every day. She was only four-foot-ten but had a personality that filled the entire room. Sometimes I pretended to be sick just to get a day alone with Grandma without my siblings. I would lie on her sofa and watch her “soapies” with her. Since I was sick, I wasn’t allowed to get up and play; of course, she knew if I was faking, but I don’t think she cared. She would make me grilled cheese or egg salad sandwiches, or whatever my current favorite food was. When Mom came home those evenings, Grandma would be the one who was hoarse because I had talked her ear off all day, forcing her to keep up.
I was an overachiever and harder on myself than my parents were when I didn’t do as well as I wanted in school. Books were my best friends. I would sneak off to the bathroom to read, rather than help clean on Saturdays. On road trips I would read an entire book in a couple of hours. We had to bring a bag of books for me alone if it was a long drive.
I remained painfully shy all through high school, and though I had a core group of close friends, I never did become the social butterfly my family believed I was.
One day our family welcomed my sweet nephew, Rickey. Since he lived with us, I had the pleasure of seeing him every day, and he brought an unrivaled light and joy to my life. His existence convinced me I wanted to be a mom someday. He fit into our family like a glove and became one of the few people with whom I was free to be myself. His little mop-top of black hair and his infectious laugh continue to steal the show, and our hearts, to this day.
It Could Be Your Most Powerful Tool
When I went away to college I made my first mind-over-matter decision. If I continued being shy and quiet, I would be back home within weeks because of my loneliness, so I decided that was not an option. I had scholarships and big plans. Having emerged from the shadows of my siblings—my unpredictable older sister and my gregarious, sporty younger brother—there was no going back. As my parents pulled away after delivering me to the campus, I reinvented myself and shed my shyness like a second skin.
I acted like the person I’d always wanted to be: outgoing, fun, and unafraid. In the first few days on campus, I walked up to three people and introduced myself; this was something I would never have done before (and I’m glad I did because all three are my soul companions to this day).
When I tell people how shy I still feel inside, especially those I didn’t know until college, their response is always the same: “There’s no way you are shy. You have to be making that up.”
Only my closest friends knew the truth. Every new interaction was painful for me, and I doubted each word that came out of my own mouth. Replaying every conversation, I would second-guess even my body movements. While I wasn’t always received the way I wanted to be, I did learn I was a lot stronger than I had thought. I realized self-perception was the only reality that mattered. I proved to myself that if I set my mind to something I could accomplish it, to the point of creating a whole new version of myself.
The recognition that I can control my thoughts about myself and my circumstances has become a powerful tool in dealing with my disease and with life in general. I share this because I believe it can be a powerful tool for you as well—perhaps the most powerful.
I met and married the love of my life, Scott, after a few false starts and missteps in my early adulthood. Those experiences helped me become who I am and prepared me for the beautiful life I have with him. Despite the youthful emotional pain of those early encounters, I am grateful for them.
Scott is patient, kind, and giving. He may get annoyed with my physical limitations, but he has never—not once in our marriage—let it show. Dermatomyositis taught me how to slow down and enjoy the important, tender things in life; my marriage is definitely part of that gift.
At some point along the way I embarked on a spiritual quest. I’d been raised to go to church but had never been satisfied with it. As a young child I questioned things I felt were inconsistent. When I first read Neale’s Conversations with God and heard its nonjudgmental messages of oneness and love, I knew it was exactly what I’d believed all along but had been afraid to say. I embraced my inner knowing and haven’t looked back since.
Stand Ready to Make Daring Decisions
After graduating from law school and passing the bar exam, I made a daring decision. With an enormous amount of debt and three-and-a-half years of school behind me, I decided that being a lawyer didn’t suit me after all. Too bad I couldn’t figure that out without all the schooling and the debt, but I am stubborn—just ask Dad. I had to see it all, digest it, and learn it for myself.
It was not an easy decision to make. Remember that supportive husband I was talking about earlier? You should have seen his face when I said, “Um, Honey, I’m not sure being a lawyer is really for me.” But as we examined it together, my decision made sense for us. First, we looked at my day-to-day health. I’d finally been diagnosed while in law school, and I was getting worse, so our thoughts had to change on some things.
Chronic migraines, all-over pain, vibrational feelings from fibromyalgia, down days due to dermatomyositis (any one of which can put me in bed for days on end), and my previous job history—it all added up to the inevitable conclusion that I’d have trouble holding down a job. Stress and fatigue play a major role in autoimmune disease, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a position with a legal firm that was limited to forty hours a week, if I could even put in that much time.
Then there was the fact that Scott is also an attorney who works many overtime hours—and we were having a child. We didn’t want a nanny to raise her, so it wasn’t feasible for both of us to work full-time—especially if it was going to be detrimental to my health. Nagging at the back of my mind, whether I admitted it or not, was also the question of how many years I had left. After all, I have a chronic, degenerative, and possibly fatal disease. Would working hasten that? Would it make me miss more of my daughter’s life?
If that wasn’t enough, my ideas about the world had changed over the years at law school, and I realized if I was going to practice full-time, I would prefer it to be with a human rights, nonprofit organization. This might have to be in another city or another country, and would likely not pay enough for day care, much less help with the student loan payments.
The best solution appeared to be to start a solo practice doing wills from home and seeing how that would go. We tried that for a while, but though I did a good job on the work I took in, my heart wasn’t in it. My health interfered even with the few legal engagements I had outside the house. I was also required to take continuing legal education (CLE) courses, and the extra load inevitably led to extreme fatigue and migraines.
After just a few years I decided to let my law license lapse rather than continuing to waste money and time keeping it active for pride’s sake. The relief was immense. It was one of those moments in which I got to decide the course of my life, instead of allowing past decisions to dictate my current happiness.
Without the stress of having to complete the CLEs and paying for my license, and with no more guilt about not actively looking for clients, I was breathing easier. And, just like the skin of shyness, I shed my life as a lawyer.
Today I serve on the board of directors of The Myositis Support and Understanding Association (MSU), write my With My Child series of children’s books, blog on health and parenting, write articles and essays for nontraditional spirituality publications, and I coauthored the book Conversations with God for Parents with Neale Donald Walsch and Laurie Lankins Farley. It is much easier to deal with my disease when I can work at my own pace and on my own schedule. I can sleep or take breaks to get refreshed and recharged as needed.
A Great Secret: Accept Changes Happily
Changes come in all shapes and sizes. What kind of changes have you had to make in order to accommodate your limitations? Many people continue to work but find less strenuous and stressful jobs. Thankfully, those who are unable to work at all are often able to utilize governmental assistance for income.
I am fortunate to be able to stay home and my husband has been able to support us along with what little supplementary income I provide. We have made sacrifices and have our share of financial stresses—student loans and medical bills don’t pay themselves. I haven’t always been a financial help, and often I’ve been more of a drain on our finances. However, I make my contribution to our family in other ways.
My most important contribution is that I homeschool our daughter. There are myriad reasons why I do so, including the quality of her education, our knowledge about how she learns best, our wish to be the strongest influence in her life for a while longer, and our desire to help her become a creative thinker. We also have to consider that it shields me from the germs she would bring home from school if she were there on a daily basis. I’ve been on immunosuppressant drugs the majority of the last twenty years, and, ironically, these drugs make you more susceptible to germs. I joke that a fly can sneeze a few rooms away and I will get a cold—an exaggeration, but it illustrates how vulnerable, in fact, I am.
Learn to Be Cautious
Prior to play dates, birthday parties, and dinners, my friends must get frustrated with my calls asking if anyone is sick. They may think I’m paranoid. Nevertheless, the level of caution I’ve adopted is necessary to protect myself. It’s hard to cancel plans at the last minute because someone in the other family is sick, but the repercussions of not canceling are harder on my family than most people can even imagine. I can only hope for people’s understanding.
Not only am I more susceptible to germs, but I’ve learned the cold it takes the average person a short time to get over can be a big deal for me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen my husband, nephew, or daughter sniffle for two days, only to find myself in bed for two weeks with a full-blown flare-up of my disease.
We are cautious when going out in public during cold and flu season. Hand sanitizer is never far from my reach. Minimizing my exposure by minimizing my daughter’s exposure through homeschooling her has helped enormously. But there are other, positive, reasons as well why homeschooling has become one of the greatest joys in my life. I get to watch my daughter learn, witness her brain developing, and see new things swirl around and finally click when she gets them.
This is one of the gifts of autoimmunity. I would not have considered homeschooling had I been healthy and ready to take on the legal world. I would have sent my child off to school without thinking of germs, without stopping to make a conscious choice about what might work better for our family, and without considering being a stay-at-home mom in the long-term. I would have remained on a traditional career path and tried to balance it all, in the end missing precious time with my sweet baby. For all of the wonderful moments with my lovely daughter—my little miracle—I say, “Thank you, Dermatomyositis!”
Creative Tips for Empowering Yourself
• Listen to life as it occurs; learn to resonate with your true needs. Starting with small circumstances, begin really listening to your heart and intuition. You can start by asking yourself a simple question: “Does this situation feel right, or am I doing it because of what others expect of me?” Making conscious choices gives you back a sense of power and control when you feel you lack the same over your body. You know what is best for your health if you will just take the time to listen. As you get more practiced at the little daily tasks, you can examine your bigger life decisions. Sometimes our planned course of action is not what works best for us.
• Give yourself permission and take the time to enjoy the view along the way.
• Get out your journal and think back to a time when you exhibited more inner strength than you knew you had. Remember where you found it and how it felt to use it. Write it down. Describe how your true self is showing up for you. Whenever you are feeling weak or defeated, reread this entry and remind yourself of who you really are inside. Add other great strength moments to the list as they arise, and you’ll maintain a living document that allows you to see how amazing you are.
• Repeat after me: “I can take control of my own destiny.”
Caregiver Tips
• Know that your loved one may have to make decisions that might seem “outside the plan” at first, but those decisions will greatly enhance health, and, therefore, daily life.
• Be prepared for a loss of income. Spending adjustments will need to be made in order to support the necessary health-related decisions.
• Assure your loved one that he or she need not feel guilty about any of this, and allow yourself to know that dealing with chronic disease is difficult enough, without feeling terrible about the effects it is having on your family.
• Understand that just as your loved one’s life and physical reality has changed with autoimmunity, your life will change as well.
• Be patient with your loved one; he or she is more frustrated with the changes than you are. With the loss of independence, dignity suffers.
• You may be asked to take on more housework and more physical and emotional responsibility in your relationship. Are you ready and willing to do so? Just as your loved one might wish to seek professional support in dealing with the changes, it could be beneficial for you as well.
• You may offer support through back rubs and foot and arm massage, which can be extremely comforting to your loved one.
Create Your Own Marvelous Transformation
Grab your journal and spend a few minutes contemplating what you just read. Use the following questions to guide you.
1. What situation or example resonated most with you in this chapter?
2. When faced with a similar situation, how do you feel, act, or think?
3. What would you most like to remember from this chapter?
Now we’re going to take this to the next level. You are going to make your own mind-over-matter decision, right here, right now. Follow these steps, and don’t skip any of the hard parts. The more thought, time, care, and attention you invest, the greater your rewards will be.
1. Set aside an hour of uninterrupted time, where you can focus on yourself and don’t need to worry about any family, social, or work obligations. If you can do that right now, wonderful; if not, go ahead and mark a date in your calendar. Make any necessary arrangements (childcare, etc.), or simply let your partner and family members know that you will be unavailable at this specified time. Do not try to skip this step or squeeze it into a five minute window.
2. Now that you have an hour scheduled for yourself, find a quiet place where you can be undisturbed for the duration of that time. Do whatever form of mental and spiritual preparation works best for you, and make sure you are in a centered, calm, and relaxed frame of mind. Now meditate, pray, or otherwise think deeply about the life you want to lead. Your ideal life. Let there be no boundaries, no limitations. No dream is too big. Allow your subconscious to put it all out there for your conscious self to see. Spend at least ten minutes thinking about the question. What is your ideal life? How do you feel there? What do you find yourself doing? Who are the people around you? What is the place or space around you? What are the activities you’re doing and the sights and sounds you’re absorbing? What does it feel like to be this happy? Let it resonate with you. Feel it in your body, in your gut, and in your cells. Let the sensations of living your ideal life wash over you.
3. When you’re done glimpsing into your ideal life, “download” as much of what you’ve just seen onto paper. Spend a good twenty minutes on this. Write notes, draw pictures, or write a poem—anything to capture what your dream life looks and feels like. Take special note of anything related to the senses. What clothes were you wearing? What colors surrounded you? What was the weather like? What aromas and tastes made you happy? The activities you were enjoying: what did they feel like to the touch? Focusing on these elements helps you side-step the logical and limiting part of your mind, giving you greater and more unmediated access to the details of your ideal life.
4. When you feel you’ve gotten the essence of your dream life captured on paper, sit back and take it all in. Which aspect of the dream—what real-life goal—can you identify that, if you pursued it successfully, would bring about the most elements of your ideal life with the least amount of time and effort? Allow another ten minutes for this thinking process. Don’t get overwhelmed with everything you think you could or should be doing; all you have to do right now is find and pick the one thing—that one activity, task, accomplishment, or change—that would get you closest to your dream in the shortest amount of time. For example, let’s say your dream is to own your own restaurant in an exotic location, where you spend your days cooking up exquisite five-star gala dinners for a glamorous clientele. For right now, your task would not be to find and apply for a program at a culinary school. Rather, you might simply make a commitment to cooking a festive meal for your family once a week and, perhaps, to challenge yourself to learn something new by using a new cookbook, looking up a new recipe online, or finding a magazine with five-star culinary ideas. The point is to hone in on what you can do in your life right now, realistically and attainably, to bring you closer to your ideal life. If you had more than one dream (and most of us do), focus on the one that makes you feel most alive. Then identify and formulate a realistic goal toward making that dream (the activities and experiences associated with the happiness you feel in the dream) a reality.
5. Now, think about and list the steps it will take to accomplish your goal. This should take another ten minutes or so. If you pictured yourself running a marathon, outline what you might have to do to get there, such as taking medicines as prescribed, attending aquatic therapy to start building muscles, doing yoga, walking around the block, walking to the store, joining a gym and walking a track, completing a 5K, or completing a half marathon. If you saw yourself in a specific career, write down the steps to achieve it, such as going to school, getting an internship, or making connections in the field.
6. Finally, for the remaining ten minutes, break down the steps you’ve listed and incorporate them into your daily life and schedule. Set dates, schedule appointments, make a to do list for today, tomorrow, next week, next month, and so on. Consider how this goal and your new commitment to it will affect your loved ones and your other existing commitments, and think of ways in which you can prepare and accommodate them. At the end of the hour, ground yourself again in whichever way works best for you, and close your mind-over-matter session with an expression of appreciation. Thank the universe for the inspiration and guidance you’ve received, and express your gratitude for all it is doing for you (whether fully realized or yet in process). You could say, “I am grateful for my health” (no matter what level of it you have right now), “I am grateful for my family,” “I love my home,” “I am excited to experience working toward my new goal,” “I look forward to that trip I am going to take” (even if it isn’t planned yet), or “Thank you (God, Universe, my self, etc.) for the financial security I am experiencing.”
I’ve never run a marathon, but a few years ago I was able to work up to running six miles, from having trouble walking to the end of my driveway. It is one of the most fulfilling physical successes I’ve experienced in my life. It was short lived, but I did it! I wanted to run a marathon and was about to commit to training for it when one of my flares hit. I didn’t run the marathon, or even continue running six miles, but the accomplishments I had along the way made up for it.
Ponder these words: “I have no attachment to results.” For me this means that I set goals, work at them, and appreciate the journey, knowing that sometimes the end result may look different from what I have envisioned. I have come to know that this is okay. I haven’t failed if I don’t reach my planned outcome because each step along the way has its own reward, and I often end up in places or situations I have never imagined.
1. Take your journal and jot down your thoughts on how you can apply “I have no attachment to the results” in your life. Some part of your life is crying out for you to embrace this idea. Which is it? What will it relieve within you when you start believing it?
2. Finally, look back at the notes you made before you read this chapter. How have your thoughts and feelings changed since then?
