There is an old proverb that all sailors know: You can’t control the wind, but you can adjust the sails.
Living with persistent, incurable diseases and/or chronic pain is a lot like sailing a boat. The progression of the disease, the symptoms, even the sudden changes and flare ups cannot reasonably be managed in most cases. How you react to each of these can be controlled.
People who have to deal with these kinds of conditions have no control over when symptoms or episodes show up. People with epilepsy don’t know and can’t prevent a seizure from coming. People with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) can’t separate their vertebrae to improve their mobility any more than a cheetah can remove its spots. People with multiple sclerosis desperately fight to slow or arrest the progression, but most have little hope of a full recovery.
But having one of these conditions, or any of the countless other diseases, disorders, and syndromes that have no cure and few successful treatments does not mean you are your disease.
You can control how you react to the disease.
A little forethought, mental flexibility, and positive thinking can ensure you’re not defined by your disease. Simply talking to your friends and family to let them know what might happen and what they should do could mean the difference between an episode being a nuisance and being a catastrophe.
You can make choices on how to approach your day so that you can accomplish all that you want without it taking too much out of you.
Planning out your errands so that you won’t hit traffic, crowds, or long lines can save you time and energy that you can devote to things you find more pleasurable.
Rather than getting bent out of shape over not accomplishing something you had planned, you could keep an activity or chore in your back pocket—in other words, a plan B. Then, you’ve still accomplished something, even if it isn’t the thing that you had planned.
In fact, you don’t have to have an incurable disease or chronic issues to learn from our friendly seafaring neighbors. You can choose how to react and how to accept the things that don’t go as expected.
See what one Canadian counselor suggested for people with ankylosing spondylitis by clicking here.
