Hey everyone,
Sorry I missed last week's post. I'm gonna be honest with you all, I'm struggling lately. My voice is kinda trashed. Honestly, I'm sure that it is permanently damaged and that it's going to stay this way until I can get health insurance that will cover repairing my vocal chords, if they can.
Damaged vocal chords is a problem for someone that has podcasts and runs yoga classes. Of course, they are just a symptom of a deeper issue with my body. That issue is also flaring up lately, making every muscle, ligament, and tendon in my body both far more painful and tight, while causing my joints to slip and pop. My epithelial tissue is fully on fire, and I don't just mean my surface skin, I mean inside my mouth, my throat, my lungs, my stomach, all of it. I'm fairly certain that my blood pressure and my heart are doing their whacky thing.
If you look at me, though, you would probably think, that woman is really healthy. Invisible illnesses are so hard. They are hard to have, hard to talk about, and hard to explain. Society, at least in the United States, doesn't like to accept that "healthy looking" people could possibly have anything wrong with them. This doesn't just stand for people with physical illnesses, like me and people with diabetes, heart problems, autoimmune disorders, but also for people with mental illnesses.
It has taken me 40 years to get to the point where I am today, the point where I will scream it from the mountain tops, metaphorically because obviously I can't scream, that invisible illnesses are real! For years, I refused to even talk about it. When I was having a major flare up, I would suck it up, push it down and try and work through it as if nothing was wrong. Most of the time the amazing result was me missing 3 weeks of work and ending up in the hospital. Finally, about 4 years ago while I was going through a rough spot, my husband finally was able to get me to see that there isn't anything brave about trying to push through. He was able to help me understand that it is in fact braver to tell people the truth, tell people that I have a "condition" and that sometimes, I just can't.
The knowledge that sometimes, I just can't is what sent me searching for something to help. Something that I could do to make me feel better about me. That's why I have fully and completely embraced Yin yoga. It allows me to slow down, it allows me to work deep inside myself. I work both on the physical and mental plane at the same time. On my bad days, I know that I can ease off of the postures and still benefit. It's because of the fact that it has helped me so much that I want to be able to share it with as many people as possible. I want to be able to share it with people that have invisible illnesses, share it with people that feel left out of society, ignored. Share it with the people that need it the most.
If you're struggling with things lately, whether they be an illness, society, or something completely different. Please know that you are not alone. I will never tell you that you shouldn't feel the way you feel. Acknowledge your feelings, accept your feelings, really examine your feelings. If there is anything you can actually do to change the situation, please try to improve it. If at this moment in time, there is no change in sight, acknowledge that, and then try to find one thing in your life that you can be grateful for and use it as a life boat to keep you alive until another positive thing comes along.
I love each and every one of you out there. If you need me, I'm just an email away.
Try and keep surviving,
Kris