Crossing the Threshold

Okay, so here goes my first official post! I was trying to decide what it should be about, and I think I would like to start out by sharing an amazing quote I (thankfully) came across during some of the darkest times of my chronic illness.

“In illness, you’re suddenly not yourself anymore. The question is: Are you going to cling in panic to some idealized self that no longer exists? Or are you going to cross the threshold and acknowledge that you’re on a journey, though you don’t know to where? You haven’t chosen it, but now you’re different in some way… It’s a profound shock to the system. It dislodges you. You look in the mirror, and one of the unfortunate ill stares back. But in a way, you could say that disease also abrades away, painfully, all of these superficial ways in which we judge our worthiness, even life’s worthiness. Our worthiness, as in: ‘Am I strong, beautiful, competent, undamaged goods?’ Or life’s worthiness, as in: ‘Life is good only when it makes me happy, or aggrandizes me, or favors my enterprise.’ But who’s bigger, you or life? There’s a Rilke poem Robert Bly has translated: ‘This is how he grows – by being defeated, decisively, by ever greater beings.'”~Marc Ian Barasch

In a time when I had fallen into a deep despair over the loss of the person I had once been, this quote really spoke to me. Because, let’s be honest, that is one of the cruelest parts of any chronic or long term illness/affliction; it makes you mourn the person you used to be, hate the sick person you’ve become, and, worst of all, question your very worth. You can no longer do the things you could before. You can’t always say yes to everyone anymore. You now have to ask for help doing the simplest of tasks. And smiles and laughs?…those no longer come as effortlessly as they once did.

But what I needed to realize was that, hey, that’s actually okay. I didn’t have to be defined by what I could or couldn’t do; it was okay to be sick; it was okay to be angry or sad sometimes; I didn’t have to prove to anyone that I was still worth something. Most importantly, I realized that I had to stop mourning the “Old Christine” (what I then thought of as the “Good Christine”), in order to get past the darkness that had sucked me in. I was still a trustworthy friend; I was still a loving wife; I was still a good person. And these things count for a hell of a lot. I finally realized that “New Christine” was not so terrible after all.

So to anyone deep in the horrible, suffocating trenches of chronic/long-term illness, this is my advice: cross that threshold and embrace the journey, as bumpy and ugly and ill-timed as it may be. Because, hey, guess what, life is pretty freaking awesome; and, oh yeah, you are pretty freaking awesome. Sometimes, we just need to step back and see that again.