Good Enough, For Now

Okay, medicine – I hope you’re worth it! One more added to my long list of drugs for my autoimmune conditions. The nausea comes in waves, my head is pounding, and all I want to do is curl up under my weighted blanket and go back to sleep. I hope the pharmacist is right – that the first two weeks are the worst and it gets much better. I’d do anything to fast-forward to two weeks from now. Yesterday, I gave in and just went back to bed. That’s not like me. Usually, I push forward even though I’m not feeling well. It’s my way of telling my diseases that they haven’t won, and that there are still things about me that have nothing to do with them. But there’s the rub. That resistance to what my body is telling me actually separates me from my body and gives me a distorted image of myself. If I deny its pleas for rest, I also deny that my diseases are a part of me. When I lean into that idea and stop fighting, I can take the pause I need to reset and honor my whole self. And yet surrendering like this still feels like failure sometimes.

I’m not pretending that this is easy for me. I struggle with feeling good enough in a world that prays at the altar of achievement. This isn’t a new feeling for me, but being sick amplifies it sometimes. I wonder if I am the best mother I can be – the best teacher, wife, friend, daughter. I’m not, but I’m good enough. The good far outweighs the bad, which is really all we can hope for. To me, that's where hope lives – in what is good.

Hope is in the pregnant future, in the wisdom born of experience and contemplation, and in knowing that now is all I have. So today, as I take another day to rest, I let hope wrap its arms around me and take me as I am.

By the way, it’s not lost on me that I took this opportunity for rest, to write. But the writing wasn’t to accomplish or prove anything. Writing helps me regroup and find hope again.