LISTEN TO ‘MIND WEIGHT’
There’s a mind weight I live with. The disease I have might be incurable. This mind weight affects my whole life and makes it hard to hope.
To add to this, I’m needing to build up my health advocacy. When I was a kid my Mom managed all my medical stuff – she talked for me, but now I need to talk for me. I need to manage my health, my illness – my medical everything. And as I’m starting to understand what it takes to manage this full and challenging medical life, it’s been putting me in a depressing mood. I’ve been told by my doctor that if I don’t take care of my illness in a certain way, I could die.
So… My choices become even more important. I have to be about what I can do for me. The context of my decisions needs to be about how I can make myself better. So my “better now” values that I try to keep are:
*I pick my battles
*I take time to meditate – I focus on my deep breaths
*I create my safe space
Even if it’s just finding a quiet area somewhere to take those deep breaths, I make sure to do so and focus on what would help get my health back better.
So this means I’m making myself my priority – making myself my #1 somebody. This has taken me some time to develop, to find the mental capacity and ability to hold on to the good memories and leave the bad stuff in the past so I can keep focused on what’s coming ahead.
It’s the difference from depression and frustration. Frustration is “I can get over it.” Depression is your body saying “f this” and just crashing. You don’t know if you can dig yourself back up because you don’t know if it’s going to be a never ending rabbit hole.
It’s this kind of heaviness that makes it harder to choose me over others. That plus the fact we’ve been taught NOT to choose ourselves. All this mind weight. Trying to keep me down , pulling on my head and heart. It’s all I can do each day to take step with it.
But I can’t back down on me. Not for anybody, and not for this mind weight. There’s only one me and that’s why I’ve got to be my #1 somebody. If I’m going to be advocating for anyone – it better be me. That’s my definition of better now – Better be for me.
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