Are you ever afraid of moving forward in your life? Living with chronic illnesses or being born with a congenital defect can weigh on your life it many ways. It can make you pause your life for your health for many years if not forever. Although, was born with a congenital heart defect my life has been in limbo I’ve felt since I was a teenager. Was I going to have the switch done (switching back my arteries to where they are supposed to be and taking down my senning procedure) or was I just going to stay like this till heart failure? When was that going to happen? How long was I going to last. When they put the PA band on pulmonary artery when I was in high school, I was never the same person. I changed.
When I finished college, it was like my body knew it had been waiting for a pause. A chance to falter while no one was really paying close attention. It was slow, then sudden; I knew something was wrong. And my life continued to be on pause. A sort of stalemate between my body and the life I wanted to so desperately live. Because of this we went into debt grasping for any chance of life I could experience and get. Living beyond my husband’s and I’s means for awhile. You know when you just have this bad feeling that you aren’t sure you are going to make it out alive this time.
I had so many ideas and dreams that I wanted to do. There were so many conversations that I had with people telling them nicely that I had plans to go back to school, I only had to pass the cbest math, I just had to go back to school to get my credential. I just didn’t know how to tell them that I had health problems that prevented me and I didn’t want it to become an excuse either.
Moving On, living with a chronic illness I know my life will never be normal. This recent surgery I know has helped me with my fatigue. I know I can do more. It’s the holding myself accountable that’s freaking terrifying. We’ve been lucky to be able to get our debt in check. But I’m so terrified of not having my life on pause that I don’t know what to do now with my life. I know want to have a spectacular life. I want to change people’s life. There is always that fear in the back of my mind that I will not pass something like an arbitrary math test or get into grad school and I will forever be this person who will be telling everyone that “yes, I’m working on trying to go back to school but I just have to…” and I will be letting everyone down including myself.
In all honesty, I’m tired of my life being on pause, of being afraid of failure, of waiting for a future that won’t come unless I work for it. I know my health will always get in the way. But I currently have one less hurdle to jump through. So here’s to less health hurdles and more playing the game of life.
Amelia Blackwater 