My Story Continued...

Hi again all, I will begin where I left off with my story last night. I ended up leaving my first "grown up" job to go back to school. I hold a Bachelor's degree in psychology and I was working as a claims taker for the Virginia Employment Commission (there is no connection between the degree and the job). Working with the mentally ill is something that I am really passionate about, therefore I had to make the leap of faith and leave my high paying job to go back to gradschool. Making the decision to quit my job and move three hours away from my family was not an easy one, but it was inevitable. The other thing that was inevitable was lots of fibromyalgia flare ups. During my first semester away at grad school, I hurt almost 24/7. I was having to adjust to school, being away from home, and living alone (which involved doing everything for myself..laundry,dishes, etc.). I also started teaching a class for the first time, and every day for the first few weeks of the class, I would get massive butterfly's before going in to teach. Butterflies=nervousness=pain. Half-way through my first semester I hit rock bottom. I found myself crying every day. I thought to myself, that everything would have been easier if I just didn't have to deal with the pain. Again, I started the "why me?" stuff.


During one of those particularly hard evenings, I picked up my laptop and started searching online for anything that might help me come to terms with what I was dealing with. I stumbled upon a fibromyalgia website (unfortunantly, I didn't write it down) that talked about acceptance. I didn't realize it at the time, but before that night, I had never trully accepted that I had Fibromyalgia and that it was not going away. I had been clinging to the hope that I didn't really have Fibromyalgia and that if I just made all the right decisions and/or waited long enough my pain would go away. That night, sitting on my couch, in my apartment alone, I accepted my fibromyalgia. You would not believe how much of a difference that acceptance can make. This brings me to where I am now, I am in my third semester of graduate school. I still feel pain everyday (I still have fibromyalgia afterall!) and I still have my moments when I get down and I want to cry or throw things (not literally, at least not all the time!) but I am making progress. In future posts I will fill you in on what I am doing to try and make living with fibromyalgia a little easier. Till next time!


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