What Happens When We Push the Envelope Too Far
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Early life with a chronic illness can seem like a continuous exercise in trying to find the edges of the limitations put on us by the disease. We grasp around us, often blindly, like children playing pin the tail on the donkey. (Do kids even play that game anymore?)
More often than not, in those early years, we find the edges of our envelope by stumbling over them and paying the price in recovery time. I’ll usually argue that this is an important time of discovery if we afford ourselves a little kindness in not running full tilt, thinking our edges are as far away as they were before diagnosis.
Living Within Our Limits
The middle years of living with what are often called “activity-limiting” conditions are more about finding a rewarding life while living (mostly) within the space cordoned off by our disease. It’s a bugger when the disease, like multiple sclerosis (MS), is a progressive one that changes those borders on irregular occasions.
Still, we get on the best we can — sometimes still pushing to find the edges and sometimes falling off now and again. Falling off means that we’re not just sitting in the middle of our disease and letting it nibble (or hungrily chomp) away at the edges of our existence. So the occasional fall off the edge is to be expected and accepted as part of living an active life with chronic illness.
For me, finding the edge has led to a fair good few “dangling from the cliff” times.
Testing the Limits
These past few months had a number of “requirements,” which I had plotted out in a manner that I thought would be a series of one-foot-off-the-edge acrobatics, but I believed my spacing would allow for me to stay on my shrunken platform.
However, “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley [go oft awry],” wrote Robert Burns, and my schemes went all kinds of agley!
The details of the cascading events and responsibilities are inconsequential to the actual experience of this parable. What matters is that the spacing, level of commitment, and unexpected modifiers to my best-laid scheme collapsed upon one another in the days and weeks leading up to it all.
Working Beyond the Envelope’s Edge
Even days before my planned activity began, I knew that there was to be no balancing on the edge. I was going to be working well beyond where my envelope ended many years ago.
There was nothing to do but to head for the edge at pace. With a running start, I jumped off the cliff and got it all done, and then nose-dived into the abyss.
It wasn’t a soft landing. Hell, it wasn’t even a direct landing, as knock-ons had me bumping and banging my way down before I finally came to rest, not at the bottom of a chasm as I’d expected … but on a new envelope altogether.
You see, jumping off as I had, there was no struggling my way back up to my former plane of existence. Rather, I found myself on a new plane.
There was a calmness in knowing that we had got done what was required, and I know the difficulty and damage the leap caused to myself and to those around me. I looked up and saw how precarious the edges where I’d planned to balance were and realized that I was going to fall from them no matter how well I placed my feet.
A Scaffolding of Helping Hands Keeps Me Upright
Just like I learned to find my life’s edges in those first years by tripping over them, I have now come to understand it’s a scaffolding of hands that are the only thing to keep me from another tumble like this last one. Hands that have always been there, and with their help, I wouldn’t have had to jump in the first place.
So, as I enter this next phase of living well with multiple sclerosis (or at least trying to), I will endeavor to remember that I needn’t run headlong into a crash. What I need is to tuck away my ego and accept the help that is always proffered.
Wishing you and your family the best of health.
Cheers,
Trevis
My book Chef Interrupted is available on Amazon. Follow me on the Life With MS Facebook page, and read more on Life With Multiple Sclerosis.
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