A Huge Life Change and Growing Stronger from Adversity

Fall is finally here. The days are getting cooler, the trees are beginning to shed their multicolored leaves, and a scurry of squirrels has inundated my backyard to stockpile nuts for the upcoming winter. This year, the arrival of autumn signifies more to me than merely the changing of seasons, but also a fresh start, and the long-awaited end to what has been one of the most challenging summers of my life.

Back in June, I wrote a blog post about the positive mental transformations I was experiencing as a result of certain changes to my lifestyle. Well, no more than a couple of weeks had elapsed since publishing that post when the physical health problems I’d been struggling with for the better part of three years came to a head and I crashed hard and fast. In a matter of days, my elbows and knees grew so stiff that I was in a near-constant state of discomfort. Concurrently, my insomnia once again reared its ugly head, and not even the sleeping medication I’d been prescribed in May could appease my racing thoughts and aching body enough for me to sleep for more than a couple of hours a night.

During a trip to Vermont in early July, I was in such distress–both physically and emotionally–that my mom had to take me to the Emergency Room. There, I was administered a slew of blood tests–to check my inflammatory markers as well as to test for Lyme and Celiac Disease, among other conditions–and underwent a brief examination by the on-duty doctor. The latter, unsurprisingly, revealed nothing abnormal; despite my crippling joint pain, from a physical standpoint, I was a perfectly healthy and able-bodied young person.

This consensus was one I’d heard many times over the last couple of years as I’d met with multiple doctors and specialists in the hope of receiving an answer for my perplexing bodily ailments. The saga had commenced three summers ago when a minor running injury developed into a distressing year-long ordeal of repeated, unexplainable “injuries” that were excruciatingly slow to heal. Although I was eventually able to return to running, my body never felt as it had before the initial injury, and I regularly had to take time off to recover from various aches and pains in my muscles and joints.

My health issues weren’t isolated to athletics either: the center of my back was in a constant state of pain, no matter how I stretched it or what I rubbed into it; I was tired a lot, irrespective of how I was sleeping at night, and my mind, at times, felt sluggish and hazy, as if my thoughts were enshrouded by an opaque fog. Bright lights, loud or repetitive sounds, and certain textures and smells irritated me to no end. I’d sometimes think I was coming down with the flu, only to have the sick-like symptoms of full-body soreness and chills magically disappear the following day.

In January, my health took a turn for the worse, and the crashes became more frequent and longer-lasting, leaving me unable to work or exercise for days at a time. Following the visit to the ER, my mama helped me schedule an appointment with a rheumatologist to hopefully figure out what was going on with my joints. Two days before I saw him, my parents and I compiled a list of my symptoms, every last puzzling affliction that had cropped up in my life since the early 2020s. When we finished, and I read it back to make sure I hadn’t left out anything, I began to cry.

“This looks like a chronic illness,” I said.

Which, as it turned out, was exactly what it was. After my appointment with the rheumatologist, and after another batch of labs, I was officially diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a neurological condition that causes chronic widespread pain and fatigue. On the one hand, receiving this diagnosis was extremely validating. It meant that my pain was real, and not just in my head; that I was not crazy or lazy or overly sensitive or at fault. There was something medically wrong with me; the problems with my health were not my doing.

On the other hand, it was scary and overwhelming to imagine the rest of my life with this condition, and painful to have to relinquish certain dreams of mine, such as to one day become an ultra-athlete. I definitely went through a “poor me” phase, during which I brooded over why this had happened to me–surely, I’d already been dealt enough hardship with my eating disorder; tacking on a chronic illness seemed exorbitant–and exorbitantly unfair!

There was a particularly miserable multi-week stretch in July when I spiraled into a deep depression, succumbing to both the all-consuming fatigue and the defeatism that insisted I’d never get out from under this; that I was once more destined to be a prisoner to illness. During that awful period, I was unable to write or move or eat; most days, I couldn’t even get out of bed. Nor could I do much in bed; such was my fatigue and brain fog that even listening to an audiobook exerted too much effort, and I spent most of those eternal hours alone with my doomsday thoughts.

Fortunately, the exhaustion began to subside toward the end of the month, and as I slowly emerged from the fog, so too did my despair. In early August, I went on a medication–one of the few approved for fibromyalgia–which helped lower my anxiety and alleviate some of the physical pain. I was able to return to the book I’d been writing before I got sick, and that provided me with both a sense of purpose and hope for my nebulous future. Although my body didn’t feel like mine, and although my life had undergone a huge and traumatic change, I was at the very least assuaged by the knowledge that I could still do the one thing that I loved most.

Gradually, I got back to exercising as well, starting with gentle yoga and short walks through my neighborhood. My body had lost most of the muscle mass I’d spent years building and was quite deconditioned; it was disheartening how little I could do before I’d tire. My fibromyalgia wasn’t solely to blame for my physical condition either, as during my depression in July, I’d experienced a resurgence of disordered thinking that had persisted even as I’d begun to improve. It’s my unfortunate reality that, even as far as I’ve progressed in my recovery and as hard as I’ve worked to overcome my eating disorder, my default when I find myself in a stressful situation is still to revert to controlling food. Needless to say, I’ll be pushing the calories in the coming weeks to restore the fifteen or so pounds I lost this summer.

My life over the last decade has often felt like a winding road, full of obstacles and forks, of thwarted plans and abandoned dreams. If past experiences have taught me anything, however, it’s that I’m capable of overcoming a lot of adversity and that the first step to conquering any obstacle is accepting its existence. No one wants or expects to become chronically ill, and I’m certainly no exception. At the same time, this happened to me, and it’s not going away no matter how badly I want it to. What I can do is learn how to manage it, and how not to let it define my life. What’s more, the past few weeks have proven that I can have a quality life with this condition.

With every thundercloud, there are silver linings. In this particular instance, having to slow down has forced me to challenge my hyper-productivity and enabled me to be more mindful and less rushed in my everyday life. As such, I have more time and patience for other people and my pets; I also have more gratitude for my family and for the things I am still capable of doing, such as writing, walking, and practicing yoga. The sense of calm I wrote about in June has returned, and with it has come an acceptance of my circumstances and a confidence in my ability to manage them, and to adapt to whatever life throws my way. Not to mention that I now have yet another lived experience to incorporate into a future book.

As is the case with mental illness, chronic illness, I’m realizing, doesn’t have to be a prison sentence. It sucks–there’s no denying that–but life goes on, and I’m learning to take one day at a time, celebrating the good days, coping with the bad ones, and appreciating the smaller moments of life: a good audiobook; a cuddle session with my cat; the crisp mornings and colorful trees of autumn in New England. I’m learning to do my best–whatever that may mean on a given day–and to be okay with that being enough.