Positivity Can Get Old For Everyone Else

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick. Tock. Tick… Tock.

The hours and days and years have dragged on. For 1356 days I’ve been living with electrifying pain in my esophagus and spine, making it impossible to eat without pain. Impossible to sleep laying down. Impossible to exercise — even walk — without spasms running up my back. And these spasms are something, let me tell you. Imagine that feeling you get when you hit your funny bone, but having that happen in about twelve discs in your spine, causing lightning to shoot through your fingers and make them twitch involuntarily.

Suffering from mast cell disorder, which triggered an immune response one night that fried my entire nervous system, I’ve had little to go on these past four years except a positive mindset. The surgery to fix my kidney didn’t solve the problem. Neither did the medicines prescribed to me. They actually made it worse. Turns out the bizarre nature of my disease makes it so that I’m unable to take any medicine to combat the pain, and pretty much anything I consume makes my body attack it like it’s a foreign invader that could make me sick. You could say I’m stuck in one hell of a catch-22.

But I’m still positive. I still believe that the pain is going to end. Still positive that I’m going to be made whole again. Because the pain does get better all the time. Minutely so, but it does. I still get zapped every day, but the flashes of lightning are smaller and shorter. I have to derive hope from that because the alternative didn’t do me any good. The nights of worry only exacerbated the pain. The stress only fueled the fire damaging my nerves.

These last few months have been quite a trip, as I can literally feel the soft muscle tissue in my back and insides growing thicker and stronger each day. It’s pretty weird. Honestly, feeling myself grow from the inside out conjures up thoughts about rebirth and all the pain we must be blissfully unaware of in the womb. Oh to be blissfully unaware again. Unfortunately, I’ve been living on the other end of the spectrum, painfully aware of how every pang of hunger, digestion, emotion and movement can affect the inner workings of my body.

I’m also acutely aware of how annoying this process is for the people I love. How old it must be getting to just wait while everything else about me is healthy now, and the only thing holding me back is this unseen problem that effects my daily life. Even though a positive mindset might be all that keeps you going, it can sometimes get old for those around you. People are used to answers. Solutions. Results. Results they can see. Everyone values effort and the positive mindset, but there is an expectation that effort will lead to success. At least within a year, for crying out loud. If it doesn’t, they expect you to move on and try something else. And this is regardless if you are overcoming some adversity or trying a new endeavor. If you aren’t any good at something, we are wired to think: “okay, you gave that a go, but it’s not working fast enough, so let’s try something else.”

Seeing how uncomfortable I am all the time, some probably question whether my positivity is just a front. Whether I’m just trying to “fake it until I make it.” After almost four years, they are entitled to their doubts. Along the way, I’ve certainly had mine. In the beginning, when I knew I had to shift my thoughts from the negative to the positive, sure, I was probably faking it a bit. After too many nights of worry, I had to retrain my brain, telling myself it will be okay when everything in my body told me otherwise. But now, I am without doubts. While the progress is slow, and while I’m still not living the life I want to live, I am making progress. That small fact gives me confidence. If people could only feel how far I’ve come, it would give them confidence too.

There are so many quiet battles all of us face where there is no quick fix. Some battles may only last a day, but others last for years. Some last for life. When others aren’t experiencing what you’re going through, it can be hard for them to see how you are making progress of any kind. But if you know that you are, sometimes that is the only thing you have to lean on. You just have to have faith in that and hope that in time, you’ll be able to prove that you really were getting better.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.