Happiness is Acceptance, Acceptance is Peace

It's been a few months, and I've realized something.

My medical history is a full one, for sure.  This year alone, I will have trumped what most people experience in their medical lives until they reach their mid to late 60's.  In the last four years, I have learned more about myself and my disease(s) than my medical professionals typically know off the bat.  It has made me a better clinician to my patients, and it has made me more empathetic as a human.

But most importantly, I feel it is vital to stress one fact: my life is not hard.

I say this now, having lived a hard life.  Sure, I can sew sonnets of woe for my past, I'm even writing a book, and I could elicit an "awww" response with a genuine story every day if I wanted to.  But I don't.  Because as hard as my life has been, I owe it to the world not to complain about it - and because I know that, right now, it is not hard.

I have a husband who loves me, and who is so patient with me and my many idiosyncracies.  I find joy in the stupidest things - from finding a clutch of snail eggs on my aquarium wall, to watching my bunnies leap over each other in the yard.  I pulled the weeds in the front of my home today, feeling pride that I have a place to keep nice.  I admired my daughter for minutes on end this evening, watching her jump around in her pajamas and yell out colors.  I love watching her grow.  I am at peace.  And, most of all, I am happy.

I know a large part of my happiness is due to my medication - when I was stricken with anxiety 24/7, I could count the days that I felt well because they were so few that I had to take stock of them.  Just before I was diagnosed with MS was one of these times - and it came crashing to a halt because of a public panic attack.  I don't have those any more.  Things have somewhat swung the other way now, to tell you the truth - I watch emotional films and listen to sad songs and do not shed a tear.  I haven't really cried in months.  I welled up at the end of "13 Going On 30" the other day for about a minute - then it dried up.  I don't expose myself to feelings of anxiety or sadness on purpose any more, and I think this is a big reason why my brain doesn't process those emotions as readily as it used to.

I am very pleased that, at 30 years old, I am content with where I am in life.  I love my job.  I love my family.  I love my home, my pets, my plants.  I even like myself most days, a huge change from where I have been.

No - I am not healthy.  But my life isn't hard. 
I know plenty of healthy folks who are beautiful, put-together, and miserable.

There is a balance of life - what we are given, and what we do with it.  I choose to make the most of what I have been given - even if that set of cards seems like a shit hand at first.  You never know what will be wild!

Love all, MSloan

About Something Else

I don't want to make my mother suffer.  That isn't what I want.

But I can't feel sympathy and compassion for someone who sends me these things in the middle of the night, but refuses to acknowledge that she needs help:
"monswters," "unrelenting evcil," "demon death to alkld humans," "died iun ny9our samddorasl msewage,"  "dlalkl oifd them murdsere3rklesdg."

I AM DIRECTLY COPY/PASTING HERE.  My mother is a master typist.  This person... needs help!!
I can't get her help if she won't seek it herself.  I can't get her to stop sending me the hate mail and I worry too much for her safety to stop checking on it to make sure she ISN'T claiming to have hurt herself.  Because just minutes after the last, obviously banged-on-the-keyboard message, was this very clear one:

"the best one is this and it is SO TRUE that in my nightmares I KNOW THIS TRUTH. there is NOTHING you people will not do to ruin my poor little life.  and I mean there is NOTHING TOO LOW for you TO DO."

These messages are NOT being instigated by anything at all.  I haven't written her back in days, because they upset me so - most of my responses are answered with barrages of nasty messages in return instead of just replying to whatever it is that I said.  My mother is the only one who's never seen an ultrasound of my baby.  She doesn't know my doppler came in, because she wouldn't answer even if I would call.  But at 4 AM, I got a string of disgusting, disorienting, misspelled and disturbing messages about how myself and my sister are putting her in danger by having a relationship with our father.  Who, by the way, she thinks killed his friend, her grandson, and a random old woman who lived near his regular bar.

My father is not a murderer.  I can't get her institutionalized without calling the police, but nothing changed and I mean NOTHING changed after her last 72 hour hold.  It has only gotten worse.

What... what do I do?
MSloan