Overcome

It's been a while since I've blogged.  A while since I've thought about blogging.  Several years ago, I blogged daily.  And then I tried to continue but I just couldn't. Sporadically, I added a few entries over the course of a few years but so much had changed--I couldn't get back in that space.

I was a different person then.  Married to a different man.  I had two less children. That blog, then, brought me so much healing.  It became a meditative place for me; a place of searching; a place where I felt close to God. I read those entries now and I almost envy aspects of my old self.  I can appreciate and even admire my own intense pursuit of God there, if that makes any sense.

In some ways, I feel as though I had a purer heart, more innocence. A divorce will straight wreck you.  I couldn't write much about it and I still feel like I can't.  Because I don't quite have the words. It's been four years and still, I can't entirely wrap my head around it. That blog was so much about married life and children and trying and searching and God.

Today, I'm married again.  I have two new children.  I'm still trying; I'm still searching and God is constant.  But I couldn't just pick up where I left off.  I've been so altered. Too much is still unprocessed; there are too many blanks--even for me--in my own story.

But I've missed that dedicated time with God; that longing, the comfort I found in writing in that capacity.  And the why of why now I'm starting a new blog is simply, that I guess it's just been on my heart.  It's terrible timing, actually, with the busyness of the holidays.  Too, I'm working on a novel I started writing in November that I feel rather committed to, there are the six children I homeschool which occupies most of every day and most all of my thoughts and there's the chronic illness which makes for bad timing with nearly everything in life.

So, I have multiple sclerosis.  I want to add something upbeat and cliche like 'but multiple sclerosis doesn't have me! Smiley face' but that would be bull sh*%.  Historically, I haven't shared much about my disease because it's kind of a downer and I don't want to seem like I'm looking for pity. But lately, well, it's been harder to ignore, I suppose.  Too, I've been thinking about how I need to read the words of others who suffer in a similar manner.  Somehow, it helps. So, I guess if I can do anything with this, I can share it as my story and what it looks like so others with chronic illnesses might not feel alone.  I can give a face to it.

My best defense for years was a good offense--there, I squeezed my cliche (I know how to spell cliche but I don't know how to add the accent :) )in--meaning, I did a lot of pretending.  I ignored it whenever I could.  I piled more and more on my plate in defiance to prove to myself that it was no big deal. But that's not as easy anymore.  Besides, I don't know that I was fooling anyone.

Last May, I was diagnosed with Valley Fever which is a b*%t#@  Blah, blah, blah.  Still have it.  Isn't helping a damn thing.  So, here I am, six months later, confessing my illnesses, I guess.  I want to tell you that it's still all good and it is in many ways.  I can walk and talk and swallow.  Just not as well or as easily. MS is a progressive disease.  It takes things slowly--at least it does from me.  It plays the long game.  I don't want to be cynical.  I pray I never have another symptom crop up in my life.  I try and practice positivity.  But I also need to work on authenticity.  With  myself.  Honoring my own truth.  And my own truth right now is that I feel like where other people have periods or days of sicknesses, I have periods or days or even only hours of wellness.  I feel like mostly I've learned to live sick.  And that's a bum deal.  And it pisses me off.  But...

And here's the crux of the new writing; the return to a place such as this: but...I have God.  I love God.  He chose this weakness or weaknesses for me for a reason and always, always it could be worse.  This disease brings me to prayer and that alone fills me with gratitude.  I am overcome.   This disease has at times overcome me, rendering me helpless, knocking me out, winning. But I turn to God and somehow, someway He speaks to me and I am overcome by His goodness and His compassionate love.

So overcome that I want to share it.