Serenity, Or We’ll Be OK

One of the hardest things about living with fibro and chronic fatigue syndrome is the unpredictability.

You can have a day where you slept nine hours the night before (with only one interruption by the baby), did the right exercise the day before, take your supplements (D-Ribose and magnesium), do a 40 minute meditation – in other words do everything right – and still end up with a sudden increase in fatigue. The afternoon drags on. The shower is tiring.

When your energy is used up, think zero spoons, and the baby still needs feeding and cuddling and putting to bed you still, somehow, have brain power to worry about what tomorrow will be like.

You have to surrender.

You have to go with the flow.

That’s hard for someone who feels more comfortable in control. It’s hard to accept that you can’t plan your way out of it.

All there is to do is get on with it the best you can and HOPE tomorrow will be better. Be secure in the knowledge that you have made your life better on the whole, you can handle one or two bad days. And those one or two bad days don’t mean anything other than a slight wobble.

The Serenity Prayer has been helping me:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever and ever in the next. Amen”

This brings me some comfort. I haven’t yet reconciled myself to my beliefs and the fact that I have prayed so desperately for healing, and not yet received it. But then I haven’t figured out many things.

So for today, I hope this brings someone comfort. That they may remember these words when they are gripped by a flare up. Or even just in daily life.