Between Health and Wealth Avenues: Little by little

Little by little

Moving past your chronic shame and humiliation: when you are dealing with long term,life altering disease, you can easily spend as much time fighting emotion and anxiety as you do facing your symptoms & fighting for your life. After over a decade of living with chronic disease, I am now able to recognize and maybe even recover a little on the mental and emotional fronts...

What I have found enormously helpful is sharing these feelings. Some people do well with support groups, AA, NA, online groups etc - I have benefited from the process of creating content for this unexpected journey into web journals which I had no personal experience using, let alone writing prior to the day I began. Literally I had never read a blog to my knowledge and had no idea how to create a page or post or get anyone to read it and that's a good thing ... if I had any knowledge of what I could end up with or how many people would show up to read my posts on average... well I would have tried to do it all perfectly and probably would not have launched the 1st post until I felt I had things organized and looking good and professional and everything else that I am now ready and able to focus on the writing process. I struggle to stay on task, on topic and in touch with the world off screen.

So blogging on Between Health and Wealth Avenues was never planned. I had no prior experience with, or awareness of, what would go into it other than the writing and picture uploads. I thought it was going to be a short term hobby with few readers and little interest from others besides a few friends, family members and chronic lymies. I was mistaken aparently. It's one of thoise times when being wrong is actaully pretty great!

Sometimes the process of writing with the intention of helping, helps you learn how to help yourself in the end. Weird huh? But that's exactly what's happening - little by little I learn, little by little I teach, little by little I move forward, little by little I move away from the life I've wanted nothing more then to leave in my wake for over a decade now - and no I do not leave my illness behind or my mistakes and suffering and the total devastation to my self esteem, faith, pride, personal goals, physical and mental strength and of course my independence. It may not appear like it to others but I am fighting the effects of these losses in my personality and perspective, to this day - and I do so because I have regained enough of my health and mental clarity and have made some real headway in many ways this last year to warrant sharing my story. I spread good news to those who need it most - but more importantly I spread hope and truth - neither of which we can live without.

I am trying to shake off the negativity and uncertainty that comes with being ill long term. I am trying not to focus on it, not to feed the ornery little devil. I need to distract myself, or direct my energy elsewhere. I am still spending time, quite a lot of time, feeling these things so strongly and so often that I don't know how to ignore or forget it except to stay busy and keep trucking along with the reader in mind. My past is chock full of horrors and harmful thinking - and now it's like a ticking clock that keeps you awake in the night when the rest of the house is able to sleep through it... well that's the way it feels regularly and that is why I share it tonight - just to let you know dear friend if you are in the fight of your life or feeling like there's no fight left in you that you are not alone. This is the bizarre world I am living in? This is what it feels like to survive - to begin again? Apparently. Not at all what I'd have thought but most of life has gone differently than I would have believed, wanted or sought. It doesn't mean it's not exactly what I need.

I am waiting for the time when I am at peace with this lifelong disease- if and when I am able to find peace - I know I am closer then I was in my 20's. Not close enough to fool my ego apparently. I should know I am not in control of this life or this Lyme by now... I do recognize this on many levels, but the damn ego continues to go on as if the last 13 years had not occurred. Sigh - perhaps that is the root of my sadness and sense of misalignment with my own emotions, experiences and intellect. They say seek and ye shall find - I am finding the opposite at this point in my life and I think all things consider, I'm doing pretty well with it- I'm trying to listen, learn, accept and admit the things that are the hardest - darkest and most imprisoning... especially since I am all too aware of how much of a prison the Lyme and co-infections is, and will be in my future most likely: improsoning me physically, neurologically, emotionally, and mentally... but that realization of being imprisoned by something neurological and diagnosable was what sent me on the path of seeking mental summits and sustenance again. I couldn't handle my own reality - nobody could I'd venture to guess - and no explanations came forward, no Doctor sat us down and explained it all. No epilogue was written, year after year it simply was... in various phases of misdiagnosis. Even after it was found and diagnosed and treated, it was still being misdiagnosed in ways that are too complex, political and absurd for the average semi-healthy western reader to believe until they live through it year after year. Take my word for it - Lyme is going to go down as one of the bigger medical tragedies in this century because it is chock full of cover ups, denials, and mistakes --- which aren't made by mistake --- if you know what I mean. Typical government bureaucracy and b.s. which has it's reasons for whatever travesty it creates or covers-up

But that's better left unsaid I suppose - oops - never was good at keeping my opinion to myself. I am trying to recognize an intense reality without painting a bigger, brighter target on my back and truth tellers especially those with imagination often end up walking right into the line of fire - am I right?

Thankfully I have regained a significant amount of strength, and immune health since I started Juice Plus and that's a fact. Yet, I have 13 years of toil, heartache, and active daily Lyme disease which consists of literally hundreds of symptoms after years without treatment because it infects anywhere your blood goes including our brain, muscle, and even burrows into skin and bone using it's spiral shape; like a corkscrew... hence the term spirochete.

Little by little we move on - little by little we find answers. It just may be the answer to a question you had never before asked.... it may be an answer you didn't consider before. It may be too much of an answer for your small delicate human brain and immature soul to handle or accept. But little by little the answers come - not all answers. Not when you seek them necessarily. Not when you wish for them and rarely in the language you speak fluently... answers come down to us like ancient artifacts unearthed slowly, painstakingly on an archeological dig. You may wish to use a back hoe and go for it - dig til you hit pay dirt but if you take a week to sift through an area carefully and in coordinated efforts then you may stumble on the items you are seeking. More likely you will find things that you weren't looking for and they will be answers to questions unasked, unconsidered, unthought. That's how I need to look at my life this year. And last year... and probably the year before - who knows what deep dark desires and despairs I was feeling and fighting at the time of regular hospital trips and ambulance rides and suffering in solitude or seeking solace in anything, even the things I didn't like or want, but when you face the kind of turmoil and pain and life or death decisions I did to survive the disease, the flare ups, the medications, the lack of medication, the side effects and sickness from the medications, well at some point you realize if you're not keeping your eyes wide open you will never come to terms with your own reality. Reality is chaos. Surviving it must revolve around something else.

Little by little

I move onward. I begin again.

Little by little
I acknowledge,
I share,
I analyze
I write
I help and hope...and heal.

The trouble is when I'm writing these things it's raw, it's new - it's occurring now so the whole "whew I feel a little better then I did" emotion I am driven towards & hoping to find when delving into tough topics about my own experience - has not happened. If I am lucky it will come right around the time I finish editing and hit post (LOL - as if! I should know better than to seek this - it will find me when I am ready.) But ideally it'd happen between being driven to share something and driven to distraction ... otherwise this post goes in the drafts pile along with hundreds of pages of writing that wasn't finished, wasn't named or dated or saved with images - just words and ellipses. Words and words and words which at some point had a beginning, middle and goal endpoint in mind but between the beginning and the goal I went off-roading and got myself lost... not this time! Little by little I will edit and progress both on page and off.

Little by little -Right? So friends I am putting my faith in you - that someone out there is with me - gets my train of thought and references and puns and follows without harsh criticism... is that so much to ask? No. And dear friend if you should be in pain, sick, friendless, stuck etc. - know now I am here for you. I may not be the best of company or the wisest. I may not be what you sought but perhaps I am what was needed? Perhaps I helped in some small way - helped you, helped myself --- who knows. When in this depth of emotion and driven to write the uncomfortable things - the unhappy thoughts, the difficult and uncertain posts, the ideas based on honesty which you don't want to write per Se yet it needs to happen... I am here in thought and mind and deed for you.

Maybe the answer you need will come on the next dig. Maybe we can find answers together?

Little by Little we'll get there.

Little by little I do what I can. It helps me and it helps those around me to see what it truly means to battle; to be a Lyme Warrior so that when I do ask for help they know it's not from laziness or habit - quite the opposite.

And so I find myself sharing my thoughts, experiences, hopes and fears with the world in a manner of speaking and helping myself and others at the same time. It's quite overwhelming - taking such responsibility. I may feel embarrassment, insecurity

I wish you a happy, healthy and healing day full of sunshine and hope! Y'all come back now ya hear?Much Peace, Audrey