Missing Things... It Really is OK

When I first got sick and as my illness has progressed, there’s become a lot of things that I have had to give up. Really, even a way of life that I had to let go of. To be perfectly honest, it’s been really hard and it is still challenging at times.

I miss the days of someone asking me to do something and the only thought in my mind was whether I wanted to do it. Now I must think about if I can do it, what will the cost on my body be the next day, can I afford that, and on and on. Gone are the days of spontaneous decisions. There’s so much thinking involved in every move I make. It’s exhausting (on top of my already deep state of exhaustion).

My next example may sound trivial or not such a big deal, but I really miss working out. Working out was like brushing my teeth to me – it wasn’t an optional part of my day; it was part of my day. I loved how a great workout made me feel and on a challenging day, it was an incredible stress reliever. It was also a time in which my creative juices flowed the strongest.

Now I can’t work out at all – to the point that if I do I will cause my body irreversible damage.

These are just two different types of examples of things that I’ve had to give up or change but there’s many more that I could go on to list. At first, I didn’t know what to think about these losses. There were so many and they came all at once. Then, I realized what was happening was that I was grieving the loss of these things that were important to me. That realization was key to me and helped me accept the strong feelings I had at the time about it all. (I was feeling like my life had been ripped from me!).

It’s now been a very good handful of years and I find myself still missing these things but to a much lesser degree. Sure, I’ve replaced them with other activities and I’ve simply had to adjust to the fact that extra thinking is going to occur in my decision-making going forward, but I haven’t really let go of the losses tied to these things. I still miss them.

Is that okay? Is that unhealthy? I don’t focus on them – the thoughts of them just come and go in moments here and there. I feel like a therapist would tell me that the healthiest thing to do would be to release these things completely, but I also feel like missing something isn’t such a bad thing as long as I don’t dwell on it and have found healthy ways to move on.

And I have. I have filled my days with new activities such as writing, reading, strengthening the relationships in my life, and also a bit of Netflix streaming. I’ve even found that replacing my workouts with gentle yoga and meditation when I’m up for it is a great filler for the gap that my inability to workout has created.

In my reading about grief and books about finding happiness and the role emotions play in our life, I’ve learned that every emotion serves a purpose. It’s really just the suppressing or dwelling on emotions that can get us into trouble. So perhaps my periodic but continuing missing of certain things in my life is okay. It’s real, I don’t feel upset about it anymore, I just simply miss it. And that, I think, is perfectly healthy. There is still much light in my life, including new light!

Like leaves changing their colors in the fall, some shedding their leaves, I too am changing my colors and turning over a new leaf, so to speak.