All I want to do is take all of my baggage to the end of the pier, dump it all, be done and get on with life. Is it that easy? Sometimes. When is it time to dump our baggage? That has to be answered by each person. When we have a chronic illness and the baggage just will not go away, it might be time to look at it again. Yuck!!
Chronic illness in my life has brought up old baggage that I have no interest in. I am so done with it. Then why does it keep hitting me in the face? I am not a psychologist with any concise explanation. All I have is my experience and what I see and hear from others.
I don’t like this particular experience but it has opened up my world in ways I never would have imagined. I have always had great compassion for others walking through any kind of trials. The more trauma that has happened in my life the more I have understood how others feel. How others react in such odd ways to life.
This experience has helped me see that it actually is not odd at all. Take a wound, poke and prod at it for decades and see how you would react. I am finally getting it with a depth I have never seen before.
As we walk through our chronic illness and pain journey, we are vulnerable enough. Maybe it is those vulnerabilities that remind us of the utter vulnerability of the prior traumatic events. No matter how much we want the past to be the past, it comes rushing up and smacks us in the face while we are ill.
This is only true for some. There are just as many people who have had a life with loving, kind people who have provided a safe environment to help resolve past trauma. Yet I am hearing from people with that kind of life experience that some of the past trauma comes up during their illness as well.
There are no hard and fast rules to this. The only thing that I do believe is true for all of us is that we are all valuable, we are all worthy of a life. Peace and joy will rise above the muck when we look for it. Sometimes we have to walk through the muck to see it. It is worth every ounce of pain while walking through it.
Maribeth Baxter, MBEC
Donations are accepted to serve others on their chronic illness journey. Maribeth Baxter, MBEC provides voluntary certified health coaching services to the financially limited during their time of crisis.
