An Endometriosis Update + Learning to Shine Your Light
“I’ve known this darkness all of my life,
I’ve kept it back by shining my light,
Who knows when it may grow,
Where it comes from, or how deep it goes.”
-Mason Jennings
It’s nearly ten in the morning and I’m sitting at my dining room table. I’ve got Levi playing dinosaurs to my left and an open window blowing in the cool morning breeze to my right. My phone vibrates as the soft tunes play from it’s speaker. I’m sitting here feeling quite lost to be honest. You see, my body is incredible pain, I’ve been bleeding for days, and there is truly nothing to be done.
Endometriosis is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. It challenges me daily, tests me daily, and drains me both physically and emotionally daily. Some mornings I’ll wake up feeling defeated, and on those mornings I work harder to push through the pain, to let in the light. But these days, it’s hard.
It’s extremely difficult explaining what it’s like living in pain all of the time. No one quite understands, although I know some truly do try. But dang does this challenge me. Some days it literally takes everything inside of me to keep going and keep pushing through this awful illness that so many women out there are suffering through right beside me.
I wake up every morning knowing that I have two options, I have this beautiful, fresh, new day right in front of me and I can either choose to let my illness ruin it, or fight back and kick my feet as hard as I can against the current to break through the surface of the water and break free.
I’ve had the surgeries, I’ve taken the medicine, I’ve done the physical therapy, I’ve tried the alternative treatments. I’ve done it all, and still I’m left with what feels like a shattered life. Sometimes I get lost in thinking about what my life would have been like if I never had Endometriosis. Maybe I would have been able to finish school, maybe I would have moved to a big city and lived out all of my Carrie Bradshaw dreams of being a writer in New York. But then again, maybe I’d be at a desk job that I hated. Maybe I never would have found blogging, maybe I never would have found my husband, we would have never had our kids when we did, etc.
I need to own up to the fact that this life of mine, is mine. It is what it is and I can either accept it exactly as is or spend the rest of my life wishing it were different. But who wants to be actively living a life that they wished was different, no one. So it’s back to the drawing board for me, back to dreaming up solutions to my pain. Maybe it’s more rest days, more breaks, more me time. Maybe I’ll take up yoga, meditation, and try to ease the pain with spiritual help. Wherever this journey leads, I’ll share it all with you. Because I know somewhere out there, there is a woman sitting in front of her computer reading these words. Maybe she’d been searching for someone else who has endo, maybe she googled a few keywords and this post came up. Whatever brought you here, thank you. Thank you for reading, thank you for allowing me to share my heart, even when it’s not sunshine and rainbows.
And if you’re battling something hard – whatever it is – you don’t have to give up either. You’ve got so much strength and light inside you, so show it, shine it. We’ve all got a light inside, and sometimes it takes others lighting the way to give us the confidence to shine ours.
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