Want to know the secret to living with a chronic illness? Or a neurodegenerative disease with no cure, even? Keep. Breathing.
If the doctor tells you you’ve exhausted the different types of medicine available to alleviate your symptoms and that this is just going to have to be your new normal – keep breathing. Process the information in, breathe your acceptance out.
If, after several good days, you wake up again in pain – miserable that it’s back after you thought you had it beat – keep breathing. Reconcile yourself to the fact that good times come and go as you breathe in. Remind yourself that this too shall pass as you breathe out.
Just keep breathing. Breathe in the moments that you may have never noticed if life, and this disease, hadn’t slowed you down enough for you to have the time and the space and the mindset to see how beautiful things are—even though you’re different now. And you hate it. Life is gorgeous in its capacity for boldness in the face of adversity.
Breathe in the experiences that live in between how you have been tested. Celebrate your successes, milestones, joy. Live in the moments of even the most superior mediocrity and love in the moments of breathtaking superiority.
Breathe into yourself all the love and faith and kinship and compassion that you deserve, just by being you. Take for yourself the simple and sophisticated joys of being simply human, flawed and floundering as you are, but immaculately and infinitely divine in your unique design.
And when you are full, so full you cannot take another breath, breathe out, and release the fear and the despair and the self-doubt that DO NOT belong to a child of the universe as perfectly imperfect as you.
You’re here for a reason. You are resilient. You are strong. You are needed. You are enough.
You are loved.
Just keep breathing.
