Hey everybody.
So, this will be a rant. I’ll probably find a way to link scientific information in somehow as I seem to do, but this a rant at its core…
The duality of life and human existence is a frustrating, beautiful, incredible, and terrible thing. Hey, I never said this would be a lighthearted rant.
Often people’s greatest qualities can also be their downfall. Someone who is incredibly motivated pushes themselves to burnout and worse. A person with a huge heart gives too much of their love away, leaving none of their heart for themself. I’m sure you can think of people who live with this conundrum.
Of course, it can also go the other way.
I always come back to the idea of duality. There’s good in the bad, bad in the good. Yin and yang. Paradoxically, duality isn’t bad in and of itself. Welcome to my Flustercluck.
I am the best I have been in (nearly) 4 years. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that my “best” isn’t objectively a good place to be. When I have forms to fill out, I have to objectively assess how bad I am doing and try and reconcile it with how I frame my progress to stay positive. For example, I can stand to make meals sometimes. These days I can often make one of my meals a day. Sometimes for several days in a row, I am unable to stand for more than *maximum* 10 minutes. For my mental health and personal progress, I consider being able to make meals a huge success. I try to tell myself the days when I can’t stand aren’t a loss, they are just a transplanted pain and function baseline from another time.
So when filling out insurance forms, or anything of the sort it becomes difficult to reconcile my “positive spin” to my “objective reality”. It is a true clusterfuck.
I don’t consider myself bedridden any more. I consider myself to “need a lot of rest”, but is that just my positive spin? The objective reality is that from day-to-day, bedridden describes my condition better than any other term recognized by the population at large. Can I do any activity for an extended period of time? No. My records are in the single-digit hours, and I pay for those with weeks of flared symptoms and pain.
I also describe myself as generally stable now. Is that even true? For my own mental health and perspective, yes. Objectively…no? I suppose it would depend who is asked, and what is going on at that time. Things go really up and down still.
So is the reality that I’m the “best I’ve been” or that I’m still “disabled and unable to complete daily tasks of living”? How can it be one and the other and both? I’m really not sure.
Aaaand that’s it. That’s the Flustercluck. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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No science ended up here but this seems relevant:
It Is What It Is 