Chronic (St)illness
As I close in on the anniversary of my chronic disease, I have decided to do something different. This year, I am not going to denounce it. Instead, this year, I will celebrate being chronically ill. After all, why would I not want to celebrate one of the most pivotal and monumental chapters of my life. It has shaped me like a river shapes valleys, gradually but immutably.
For years, I have woken up with excruciating pain bolting through my body. Fatigue that has made it difficult to move around the house let alone get out. My bones have stung and my muscles crumbled. My intestines have twisted and my thoughts bumbled; most days have been a battle. Yet, in retrospect, I would not give this up for anything.
The daily battles taught me how to fight because I had no other choice. When you can no longer flight, all you can do is learn how to fight. That is not to say you win every day, (there are days I went to bed crying and days that I wished would end as soon as they began) but you get up the next day, and wrestle your demons all over again. You fight and struggle; you chip and crack and all the while you gain strength. We are, after all, stronger in all the places we are broken. In sickness and in life, you don’t cave in, you never cave in. For you have only two options, you get bitter or you get better and this sickness has pushed me from the former to the latter. I spent months lamenting my condition, drowning in thoughts of self-pity and begging for universal redemption. When it seemed like nothing could save me, I did the only thing I could. I decided to save myself. At the end of the day, only you can liberate yourself.
My only answer to the question, “How has this changed me?”, is a question, “How has it not?”. This condition has taken from me everything I had become and left me with all that I should be. All of me has changed. My mind, stretched beyond its original dimensions, now sharper than ever. My body, having lost all the muscle I had ever built up, weaker relatively yet somehow more resilient than ever before. It killed me, only to give me a new life. My habits adapted and my way of life transformed. My old life like a dream I can barely remember. Through my illness, I discovered that the only way to heal is to synchronize my body and mind. Attune them with the flow of life and my environment. It took years of debilitating pain to finally realize that we are connected to the greater whole; that we do not come into this world but out of it. Illness comes from a mind and body that has lost its rhythm and forgotten its song. Not for nothing, they call it dis-ease.
Apart from a new life and a lesson in quantum entanglement, this delightfully exhausting condition presented me with “new eyes”. Saddled with the monotony of life, I didn’t even realize when I became blind to the world around me. That was till the illness returned the one thing I had dropped somewhere in the circus of life, perspective. Able to see again it felt like the world never changed yet nothing remained the same. Years of this gruesome disease showed me what meditation and psychedelics could not.
In all these years of being sick, I have seen more splendor and meaning than I ever thought was possible, sober. I have come to appreciate the magnificence of moments — not moments of brilliance and greatness but the mundane and ordinary ones. Sprinklers shooting jets of radiating water, birds surfing through the air, bees buzzing and humans arguing, oblivious of the pleasures of health. Somewhere in this madness, I had forgotten to slow down and recognize the simplicity and its inherent beauty. Armed with perspective, I also discerned that which was hiding in plain sight. The equal and opposing truth. Sickness is the doorway to health. Darkness cannot exist without light. Death and life are alike.
The most invaluable lesson, however, has been the remarkable link between mind and body. They are more intimately connected than I could have ever imagined, two parts of a whole. While they no doubt transform each other, it has become increasingly clear to me that the body follows the mind. The mind is all-powerful, everything begins and ends in your head. All of it. On days when I had everything to look forward to, I have pummeled the most ruthless of flare-ups only for the tamest of them to strike back on hollow days. I have felt piercing pains evaporate and similar pains crystallize solely by the sheer power of my mind. This weakened body has fallen apart when fed negative thoughts and pushed beyond its humble frontiers when fueled by positive ones.
Moving beyond, as long as I let go of it all — the accumulated pain, the suffering, the body, the joys, the worries, the what-ifs, the expectations, my opponents, my notions, my thoughts, my ideas and most importantly, of poor little me. The moment all of that ceased to exist, in that moment I became indestructible and all action attainable. Ego wiped, thoughts suspended; I became pure and clear. I could access the depths of my mind where absolute consciousness resides. Where the knowledge of billions of years dwarfs my insignificant experience of two decades. Where instinct and intuition guide. Where harmony and balance nurture. Where all movement is spontaneous effortless and actionless. Where everything is formless and still.
That is how it has enlightened me. It forced me to wander the abyss that is my mind and discover its true potential. It revealed to me the secret sauce of life. The mind has unfathomable power that can be only be exercised if I get out of the way. The mind knows exactly what to do and how to heal but needs me not to think. It needs me to be devoid of the process. It needs me to be absolutely still. My chronic stillness might just be the solution to my chronic illness.
