When I originally had the idea for this article, it was going to be all about how life in the slow lane can be a blessing in disguise. Chronic pain and illness forces you to slow down, to measure and conserve your strength—and by necessity, to focus on what is truly important. This also gives you the opportunity to appreciate things that most people rarely notice. I see the wonder of the world each and every time I walk out the door precisely because I don’t get to walk out the door very often anymore. So there you have it: life in the slow lane can be beautiful.

Then I got hit with an extreme pain flare and had two months flat on my back to rethink that. From the last week of July on, I was largely bedridden, unable to even tilt my head to read a book or look at a TV screen. I nearly went crazy, not just from sheer boredom but from panic about all the things that weren’t getting done while I languished in agonized tedium. Even now that I’m gradually getting better, it still feels like I’m stuck in the slow lane, watching life speed by from the passenger seat of a car that’s running on fumes.

But last weekend turned out to be something of a minor miracle: the wildfire smoke cleared out unexpectedly, and I felt good enough to go out for the first time in what seemed like forever. I spent the day at my favorite farm outside town picking flowers, buying peaches to turn into cobbler, and sampling the first apple cider of the year.

A second miracle followed the next day: managing the drive to visit my in-laws in Colville, where we sat in the backyard for hours longer than I would’ve thought possible, chatting and watching quail scurry through the raspberry bushes.

That was the last day of real summer heat, and now autumn is on its way. Most of the trees are still verdant and green, but here and there shades of brilliant gold and crimson dapple the leaves, and the intermittent breeze carries with it the first hint of cold nights and the scent of ripening apples.

In a back corner of the lawn, a heap of dying flowers lies amid grass turning sere, each fading bloom plucked from the vase as it began to wilt to give the bouquet a chance to retain its ephemeral beauty as long as possible. This is the time I love most in the Pacific Northwest: the gradual descent toward winter, the dying of the year, so filled with an elegance that is at once fierce and melancholy.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about life in the slow lane: it is a little like autumn itself, terrible and beautiful at the same time. There are times when your engine stalls and you’re stuck for so long you think you’ll never manage to get going again, and there are times when God gives you small, unexpected miracles and perfect days that are all the more precious for their rarity.

It’s the last summer flowers gracefully fading away, the leaves turning more vibrant even as they drop from the trees, the cold rain and gray skies and the days growing shorter and darker. It’s bittersweet melancholy and fierce beauty twined inextricably together, the sorrow of a life more limited than it should be and the joy of a life lived as fully as possible.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Image by Love Art. Live Art. from Pixabay

For someone who struggles with so much pain on a daily basis, I’ve been lucky. Unlike so many people who suffer from invisible illnesses, I have the full understanding and support of my friends and family. No one ever makes me feel guilty for not joining them at an event, and no one has ever said insensitive things that belittle my experiences. Of course, there are still the weird looks I get from strangers on the rare occasions I feel good enough to go out, as if carrying a stack of pillows into a restaurant or having to stand in the back for part of a movie is some egregious act of social rebellion.

But as wonderful and supportive as my friends and family are, they don’t know the full extent of what I go through. For the most part, they see me only on the good days, and even then for just a few hours at a time. The most they see of my pain are the special pillows and chairs I use, the pills I take, the times I have to lie down or leave early.

They don’t see what happens when I get home, how I scream bloody murder when my husband rubs arnica and epsom salt oil into all my locked-up muscles in an attempt to relieve the pain that is always, always the price of doing anything other than lying on the sofa. They don’t see me when the pain is so bad, so far beyond the help of traditional and holistic treatment, that I literally do not leave the sofa at all, not even for a glass of water. The weeks when even reading a book or watching TV hurt because the book is suddenly too heavy and the slight angle of my head to see the TV tugs at my neck and shoulder muscles in all the wrong ways.

My menorrhagia is even more invisible. I never talk about it with anyone except in the most general terms, so the only person who sees the toll it takes is my husband. He’s the one who has to clean up the trail of blood in the hallway while I’m sobbing in the shower at 3 in the morning, watching the blood pour and pour out of my body endlessly. The weeks where I sleep only in brief snatches because every fifteen minutes, like clockwork, another clot sends me running to the bathroom praying that I get there before bleeding all over everything again–and most of the time, I don’t make it even though I’m wearing six pads and the bathroom is less than a dozen steps away.

And then there are the things that are truly invisible, the things that even my husband doesn’t see. Because of my pain, we don’t share a bed on a regular basis, so he’s not there to see how many nights I cry myself to sleep, the anguished prayers for healing and the fights with God about whether or not my life has any meaning.

In 2012, when I spent most of the year struggling with suicidal thoughts, my husband only knew that I was more miserable than usual because my pain levels had increased dramatically. He was actually in the house at the time I came closest to killing myself, completely unaware that in the room above him, his wife was sobbing out every dark and desperate thing in her heart with a knife in her hands.

This is chronic illness: a constant battle with endless layers, and each time you peel back a layer, there are fewer and fewer people who have any visibility into what it truly means. My pain is almost completely invisible to a stranger–I’m only thirty-six, and other than being a bit overweight, I look like I’m in reasonable health. The pillows I cart around, the frequency with which I have to adjust my seat, how I sometimes need to stand or sit when it’s not appropriate… These things draw some attention, but they don’t reveal the anguish caused by simple, everyday activities.

To my friends and family, it means I cancel plans, tire easily when I do show up, and almost always go home early. My husband sees more than anyone else: the days when the slightest movement makes me howl in agony; the ordinary tasks I cannot do for myself, like putting on socks and shoes; the hours I spend in the bathroom swearing that if I had a scalpel, I’d dig my damn uterus out myself. But even he doesn’t see everything. A large part of this fight will always be invisible, because no one who has not lived through it can truly understand it. Even those with similar conditions have their own battles to fight, their own unique array of symptoms and internal struggles.

In such circumstances, it’s easy to believe that we are completely alone with our pain, but I have come to believe that the opposite is true. The day I almost committed suicide, the day when I was the most alone, what kept me alive was not the encouragement of a loved one or a counselor: it was an unexpected gift from the world.

It was a snowy day in February, and yet there was a flock of a hundred robins in my backyard that morning. More robins than I had ever seen in my life, months before they should have returned from their winter migration, and every last one of them was singing as the snow came down. And that was what made me put the knife down: that God had brought the very birds which are a universal symbol of hope and rebirth to me at exactly the right time, and in such overwhelming numbers that I could not possibly have ignored them.

I’ve seen this other times, too. Huge, vibrant double rainbows in the sky on the day I buried a beloved pet, the golden harvest moon cresting the horizon right in front of me on a drive home when the pain was so bad I could barely breathe. Small blessings shining out of even the darkest times, messages of hope to tell us we are never truly alone.

~With thanks to Debi, whose own writing helped me understand what was in my heart this week.
#ThisIsChronicIllness  #InvisibleIllnessAwarenessWeek

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain