Grief Over Your Old Self
When you have to deal with autoimmune diseases the one thing that I wish I had known was that you have to mourn. You mourn the loss of who you were, what you could do, and where you were going in your life. You get the sense of impending doom at every turn when you are first diagnosed. When the doctor delivers the news, your world, as you knew it comes to a screeching halt. All sense of being is removed in that split second when you hear that what you have is incurable, it is progressive, and it will eventually be what kills you. That is a hard pill to swallow that you will die mostly likely due to this illness, if not the illness itself an off shoot, complication, or co-morbidity of the illness.
Dealing with autoimmune illnesses takes the you out of being you. It makes you mourn for what was and what could have been. When I was first diagnosed I didn’t realize that I needed to mourn and I needed to deal with what I was facing. I instead decided to ignore the symptoms, ignore the news, and keep living my life as I had been doing. So after being diagnosed I just continued to live my life as is nothing had changed. The issue with doing that is that it set off a horrible flare and I ended up being hospitalized. At that point I knew I had to deal with what I was experiencing. I began to read everything I could find about my illnesses, tried to absorb the information and figure out how to apply it to my life. Don’t get me wrong I still was not dealing with issues at hand by any measure I continued to have the mindset that nothing was going to happen to me. Well I was sorely wrong, something happened to me, I relapsed and I had to face what my life was going to become.
Over the next year or so I had to give myself permission to mourn. You need to grieve over what is lost it is healthy. I began to see a counselor who helped me see just how much I needed to lament my former self. So I set off on a fact-finding mission to help me deal with the pain I was experiencing. The more I learned the more I knew that I had to agonize over what was happening. I finally allowed myself to mourn, to cry, to scream, and to deal with what was going on. I grieved over who I was because that person was never to be seen again. That is something that is hard to comprehend unless you are in that position. It is as if someone or something has come in to steal from you everything you have ever known to be true. Imagine that you have closet full of pictures, boxes of memories, and someone comes in and sets it all on fire. Everything you have is lost and you won’t get it back because you never uploaded the pictures anywhere. That is devastating to deal with; you have just lost it all.
In losing it all you now have to deal with the pain that goes with that. Allowing yourself to grieve is a natural process when you lose something. I had to mourn my former self; I could no longer do what I used to do. I have realized that I will mourn for myself always, it is never going away. I can choose to dwell in it or deal with it and make the best so my new life. I honestly switch back and forth from day to day; there are days where I am okay and other days where I fall apart for no reason. Well it is not for no reason, it is because I can no longer do what I used to do and that frustrates me badly. I have days when I mourn the lesions that affect my memory and cognitive functions. Days come where the emotions are overwhelming due to the location of a specific lesion have to mourn that.
Mourning is an important thing to do with autoimmune diseases. In dealing with this, it is important because it is going to continue progressing and you will find yourself being able to do less and less than you could before. Part of dealing is to mourn it all, even the small parts of you that are missing. For me the heat is a killer so I mourn the fact that I will most likely never go to the beach again for a long period of time because I can’t tolerate being outside that long. I have had to deal with that fact and I mourn that former part of me. I have had to mourn changing medicine to try and find what works to keep the symptoms at bay. Along with the mourning come victories as well. It is a victory that I am able to get up and get ready everyday without assistance. So I celebrate the victories just as I deal with the mourning. I mourn who I was before my diagnosis but I revel in who I am becoming as I deal with these issues. Take time to mourn but don’t get stuck in that mindset, be present with the feelings but don’t get overwhelmed, remember you are still you just a different version.