Once you’ve suffered chronic illness for years and years, you’ve probably read and heard a lot about it already. A lot of things can get repeated to you. People might be well-meaning with advice, but hearing that Yoga will help, the 100th time, isn’t really helpful advice. We might all know what would be an ideal, a stress-free personal and work life, disciplined exercise regimes, a nutrient rich and healthy diet and restful sleep. It’s getting those things is the problem, when the wall to them is higher than you can possibly scale.
It seems there are easy answers all around us. “Try to do more exercise?” As if we haven’t tried multiple exercise regimes year on year. “Have you tried keto?” Yes we have, it didn’t help, nothing helps. “Try to reduce stress before you sleep”, as if the constant pain and fatigue which are the main causes of our stress, can be reduced on a whim or ignored easily.
The fact is, any advice, helpful or not, has a counter point. We’re likely well aware of the pitfalls of most advice already, so hearing it again, isn’t going to somehow make those go away. The pitfalls of changing your diet, are basically that it requires a lot of effort to change, and effort requires energy, and a person does not necessarily have the energy to come up with totally new meal plans, meals that might require a lot more time to prepare, or even have the finances to afford a healthier diet in the first place. The fact is, cheap and convenient foods is generally bad for you, and there’s a reason for that. It’s less nutritionally dense, and it’s often already been cooked and processed, various chemicals are put in it to preserve it for mass-sale. To increase taste, sugars get refined, and stripped of the fibre bound to them, toxins are introduced to increase yields in crops, animals are fed growth hormone, etc.
According to various statistics, the world is clearly not on a healthy diet, and people have been adjusted to this over the last few decades in the name of corporate profit. Only now is anyone really trying to unwind this damage on a societal level, with sugar tax levies etc, but there still remains the issue that artificial sweeteners often replace sugar and are just as bad for our health if not worse.
Changing our diet when we’re ill is something we’ve likely already done anyway. Improving that diet is not something that should be done in a day or a week, even though there is an urgency to being on a good diet. Basically any movement towards healthy is good, and there’s little sense in shocking your system with a big change that you can’t maintain. It can take years for your palate to adapt to new food, and having the motivation to eat healthy is huge, as without it, you can easily fall back into old habits, since as they say “old habits die hard”.
Even this isn’t a new perspective, we’ve all heard that we should take baby steps, as to make a big change can backfire on us. But taking baby steps all your life, might not really work either, years later, you could still be far from your goals with just baby steps all the time. At some point you need to make real progress, and whilst tiny steps do lead to “improvements” eventually, it seems much better to look for improvements that will snowball, not trundle along at a snail’s pace.
We’re all looking for a miracle pill, or a watershed moment, there’s that hope that the next turn will have light at the end of the tunnel, since it seems like we’re just stumbling around in a dark maze every day in terms of making progress. My personal belief is that if you look for something too hard, sometimes you’ll miss what’s right in front of you. To meander in life and go with the flow, is clearly less suffering than to struggle every day. But the fact is, with chronic illness, you struggle every day just to cope with basic things. Contradicting my own beliefs, I somehow know it’s sometimes not enough to just meander with hope and live in the present, when every moment is a battle with suffering, with no rest from it.
It’s very easy to fall into a fatalist perspective when you’re chronically ill, especially if you’re a determinist also. If everything is determined, and you have no control over your future, you seem akin to a passenger in life, as you are part of life, and not separate to it, your actions are the culmination of everything that has preceded, and your future actions are also the culmination of everything that will happen, and you can’t change that culmination, because you can’t change reality, and even if you could, that in itself would still be determined by who you are.
You enter an impasse with comfort, that there is no control, as the opposite of determinism is pure chaos, except pure chaos has no stability, so nothing would likely persist as it would chaotically come in and out of existence with no pattern to predict it. This alternative is even less comforting than everything being determined, you just transfer power from the determined history to the chaotic will.
There truly is no comfort in thinking you have control of things, and that you can alter your path. But in a different perspective the path is only made once it’s trodden on, the good thing is we can’t see the future and all possibilities, and even if we could, like I said, it still wouldn’t change determinism’s effect on decisions. Awareness of the present, self love, love of everything positive around us, that aligns with us and hope are all we really need, not control.
It all sounds very cliché, but clinging to fatalism; that there’s no point in anything you do, because you’re guaranteed suffering and death at some point, is just completely wrong. It’d be like saying, that it doesn’t matter how the journey from A – B goes if we all make the journey, because we all end up at B. You could send a parcel in a cannon to its destination, or you could carefully deliver it, surely the difference matters. Putting all your focus on your final future destination, not your current position is wrong, and even then, it might be true that in the end matter how you spent your time in life does indeed matter, nobody knows for certain. After all the journey is life, not the destination, nobody knows what the destination is, as it is uncommunicable as of this time.
Right now I’m going to guess that your journey through chronic illness probably isn’t very “fun”, you might have run out of hope and motivation. You might be depressed, unable to enjoy things in life. You might look at every part of your life, and think, “it’s in pieces”. Your career, your family’s future, your sense of worth, everything you can think of, might seem to be going badly, a life filled with insurmountable problems. Let alone looking at your own life, you might look outside it and see how human society is faced with numerous problems that also seem insurmountable and destined for a vast amount of suffering for everyone concerned.
Whether you’ve heard this perspective or not, this negative outlook on life, is just an outlook. It’s all a perspective, no one can guarantee the future, so feeling hopeless about the future is simply wrong, unless you’re literally staring certain oblivion in the face.
The only future you can even try to guarantee, is that if you do nothing, it’s likely nothing will come of it. If you do something, there’s at least a chance something will come of it. That’s why I advocate continuing to try in the adversity of failure and doom, as cliché as it is, there’s simply no other perspective worth having. Just make sure you try for things that are within your reach, not things that will make you fall even more. If it’s not determined that reading this brings you a positive perspective, then at least I hope something in the future will, and I even say this to myself.
You’re right, never give up!!