What We Loose To The Fog
I had a pretty bad day about a month ago where multiple different things happened all at once within five minutes of waking up that caused me to experience a strong feeling of loss and disconnect from every aspect of my life - friends, love, family, and career/hobbies/projects. It felt like the tiny little bit of a life I had carved out in the last 2-1/2 years since starting Abilify was all crashing down at once. But this experience put pressure on me in a unique way that helped me gain perspective and I realized many things about my life and what I wanted. Then I burned so much energy processing all these emotions that I wound up crashing and felt so numb that I didn't really remember what upset me in the first place. :-/
I guess in some ways that could be construed as a win because I was numbed from the pain. But I also forgot some profound realizations and ideas and perspective on my life.
It’s an awful experience when you have mental clarity or emotional clarity and then you use energy to process your emotions or circumstances with this clarity and your brain crashes and you loose all the things you realized because you didn’t have time to internalize them well enough or write them to memory properly.
I have experienced this quite often. I am now very careful not to crash when I have moments of clarity and I try to write so that the ideas are recorded. But when you have Very Severe ME/CFS you cannot write and you just have to accept losing many profound realizations and life changing breakthroughs. The 7 years I spent hardly able to move, unable to communicate in any way and in complete desolation are now pretty blurry to me. Probably partly because of how intensely traumatic this time was and my mind likely blocking it out but also because my mind was barely alive and couldn’t write my experiences to memory very well. I remember my physical circumstances, but many aspects of the feeling I had during this time are blurry to me. Which is sad because it was probably the most profound chapter of my life and it completely changed me. I hope more will come back to me when I get better; Maybe one day if I can put down my sword long enough to grieve.
This is something we must all cope with, there is no easy answer. We must do our best to hold onto the things we learn from the trauma induced by ME/CFS, for it is the greatest teacher on earth. It takes away everything and forces us to confront ourselves and learn to live with ourselves, know ourselves, and even love ourselves. This is a gift. But we also must accept loosing some of these lessons learned due to the nature of having ME/CFS. All we can do is our best to learn and move forward and be the best people we can be. Learn what we can, and give it back to the ME/CFS community and someday, to the world.
Love,
Whitney
I guess in some ways that could be construed as a win because I was numbed from the pain. But I also forgot some profound realizations and ideas and perspective on my life.
It’s an awful experience when you have mental clarity or emotional clarity and then you use energy to process your emotions or circumstances with this clarity and your brain crashes and you loose all the things you realized because you didn’t have time to internalize them well enough or write them to memory properly.
I have experienced this quite often. I am now very careful not to crash when I have moments of clarity and I try to write so that the ideas are recorded. But when you have Very Severe ME/CFS you cannot write and you just have to accept losing many profound realizations and life changing breakthroughs. The 7 years I spent hardly able to move, unable to communicate in any way and in complete desolation are now pretty blurry to me. Probably partly because of how intensely traumatic this time was and my mind likely blocking it out but also because my mind was barely alive and couldn’t write my experiences to memory very well. I remember my physical circumstances, but many aspects of the feeling I had during this time are blurry to me. Which is sad because it was probably the most profound chapter of my life and it completely changed me. I hope more will come back to me when I get better; Maybe one day if I can put down my sword long enough to grieve.
This is something we must all cope with, there is no easy answer. We must do our best to hold onto the things we learn from the trauma induced by ME/CFS, for it is the greatest teacher on earth. It takes away everything and forces us to confront ourselves and learn to live with ourselves, know ourselves, and even love ourselves. This is a gift. But we also must accept loosing some of these lessons learned due to the nature of having ME/CFS. All we can do is our best to learn and move forward and be the best people we can be. Learn what we can, and give it back to the ME/CFS community and someday, to the world.
Love,
Whitney