Soul Searching

Apologies again for not blogging regularly. This year seems to be getting away from me! I have been doing a bit of soul searching to try and find the reasons why I'm not blogging other than the health issues. I understand now why.

When you blog you put your heart and soul into it. You hope your readers are interested and understand. They may not get the illness side of things but you hope they will empathise. You hope that they are clever enough to see the humour in your posts, that despite all the rubbish stuff that is thrown at you, you still rise above the situation.

However I have found the truth to be very different ..... its not connected to my blog its actually other social networking sites. Its very difficult for me to come up with witty and amusing posts when life consists of being virtually housebound. I have discovered that I am not "allowed" to say how I feel to people who are supposed to be my "friends" because I'm always sick and its depressing to hear. I apologise that you find my life so depressing, just be grateful you don't have to live it.

People who complain my posts are depressing don't seem to understand that a good day for me is being able to do something normal like go out for lunch (a rarity) or not spend the day in bed. When I post about my health its because it has been a particularly challenging day and I need to vent. Who can I vent to when I don't really see any people other than my husband? Out of the hundreds of "friends" I have I see two on a regular basis. One I have been friends with for years and one I have made friends with since becoming ill.

I on the other hand don't find my life depressing, am I odd? I find my life humorous, a challenge, filled with love and quite a bit of support from real friends who know me and understand that I will never get better (the chances are I will only get worse). They don't have to wait for me to be well to come over and see me, as the chance of me being well on a particular day are negligible. I make the most of what I have and enjoy it. I made a decision a long time ago that sitting around crying and banging my head against a wall for the rest of my life would be futile. It would be a waste of the precious little energy I have and I wont waste that.

I have wobbles when I do feel depressed, last year after several diagnosis were made and I was told the words "treatable not curable" I cried for two days solid. I have days when I get down but I give myself 24 hours and promise myself that tomorrow will be better. I think when living with a chronic illness you would be pretty strange if you didn't have your ups and downs.

I have in the past had to let "friends" go. Friendships change over the years and when one of the friends becomes ill and is no longer able to do the things they once did it can be difficult for the other to get their head around it. I understand that completely as will most people who live with a chronic illness. Be ill for more than a month and see how many people bother to contact you. Its scary but when you are no longer on the social scene its amazing how quickly you are forgotten by people you thought you would be friends with forever.

Letting a friendship go is never easy but for me it was a necessity. I could no longer stand being let down when a visit was cancelled at the last minute due to them going out with other friends or realising after a small experiment that if you didn't actually text them it would be 4 weeks before they noticed. Friendships cant be forced and they don't recover after events like these.

So to sum it up I haven't been blogging because I'm terrified of actually expressing my true feelings anywhere. It seems I must paint on a sunny smile whenever I express myself to people outside my family or two friends in the fear I may depress other people. Well on my blog I say to hell with that. You the readers have a choice to read or not to read, over 5,000 of you have chosen to read. I think that speaks volumes.

So now I am off out into the garden to enjoy this brief spell of sunshine, have a good weekend xx