If you told me three years ago that I’d be blogging about autoimmune disease, mentoring other women working from home, I wouldn’t have believed you.
No… if you had seen me three years ago, you might have found me paralyzed in my car, crying in an empty parking lot. I cannot tell you how many stores I never made it into that year, or how much time I spent in the driver’s seat, keys on my lap inside my garage, either unable to walk inside or too overwhelmed to put it in reverse. My car was always a safe place and maybe the only place I really allowed myself to grieve because nobody else could see me.
My sister died at the end of June that year. I spiraled into a puddle of grief and couldn’t wear mascara until Fall because I never knew when or where I would lose my composure. At the end of her life I had become so frustrated with her addiction that I thought “tough love” was the only way to handle her. That is a post for another day, but what I learned the hard way is that you should never show tough love to anyone. Just love them hard. You won’t ever regret that.
It wasn’t until October that I found a book called, Anxiety. The Missing Stage in Grief. If you are struggling, grieving the loss of someone you love or perhaps experiencing anticipatory grief, which is common when loving someone that battles addiction or a disease, this book may help you understand your body. I had no idea that with those waves of grief, there was also an undertow called anxiety, pulling me out to a sea of hopelessness. Every time a wave would recede, the current would pull me further and further away from the shore of how my life once felt.
I had no idea that there was a sleeping giant, lying dormant in my body, probably tied to the Epstein Barr Virus I had at 18. Envision a gun and the bullets being toxins in my environment, inadequate vitamin D, inflammatory foods, EBV, trauma from a terrifying divorce, ect. loading the chamber. My sister’s death pulled the trigger and BOOM. Tremors, my very first MS symptom that I could recognize.
While these events were devastating, they each made me pivot. My plans and my path had a road block. I had to say “no” to something that I thought was my dream. What I have learned is that sometimes there is a greater purpose and it takes a broken dream to wake up and see what we couldn’t possibly have imagined.
