The ICI Experience:

A prayer for Sunday's post seems appropriate. Although I'm getting this post out so late that subscribers might not get it until Monday. Speaking of Monday, I have to have a root canal tomorrow. I forgot about that when I decided to try NaBloPoMo again. I'm not going to try to post tomorrow, which takes me out of the NaBloPoMo competition. I'll have to see how the root canal goes before I decide how often I'm going to try to post for the rest of the month. This Prayer for Peace was written by Thomas Merton , read in Congress on April 18, 1962 and placed in the Congressional Record. It was at the request of Frank Kowalksi, Congressman from Connecticut.  In 1962 the Vietnam War was happening, but it seems to be totally applicable here and now.  It also seems to me that it's a prayer that might be accepted by most religions. What does this have to do with chronic illness, you might ask?  I'll tell you what I think about that at the end of this p...

National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week // Bloggers Unite I'm writing today as part of Bloggers Unite, which is an off shoot of BlogCatalog . Bloggers Unite is an attempt to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By asking bloggers to write about a particular subject on a particular day, a single voice can be joined with thousands to help make a difference in raising awareness of a particular issue, in our case, ICI. I've chosen to write about chronicity vs. disability because it's an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a few years now. Laurie Edwards, of A Chronic Dose wrote a similar post recently, titled Illness vs. Disability . In it she says "people with chronic illness may be considered disabled, but people with disabilities do not always have chronic illness." This is an important distinction. Her post goes further into the semantics of the situation, and she promises we'll hear more from ...

Last week Sick Momma wrote about those annual holiday letters in Cue the Violins . She likes to receive them just like I do. She worries because she is starting to get dropped of some peoples' holiday card lists because she hasn't had the energy to send any cards out herself for the last couple of years. She writes: ... it's like one more connection with the "healthy" world at large is getting thinner and thinner. Everything just seems harder than it should be, and more complicated than it needs to be. Sigh. I know what she means. For the last ten years I've been dealing with gradually worsening and multiplying chronic illnesses, as well as a divorce. (Yeah, I dragged the divorce out for ten years so I could at least get SOME of the money I put into the house out of it.) It's been at least that long since I've been able to send cards out, and since I had to move to another state and then became unable to work, I've been wanting to send a holi...

Crystal Beach is on the Bolivar Peninsula. It's kind of above Galveston. It's point A, like this: View Larger Map I don't know about you, but I haven't seen or read much in the mainstream media about the devastation of Bolivar Peninsula caused by Ike. The guestimates so far are that 80% of civilization on the peninsula is gone. Just gone. Poof. There were a lot of high dollar houses in Crystal Beach, most of them being vacation homes. I guess I've been getting my information from "social media technologies." I read about it on a post on a blog of social media for a PR Class, "Houston media relies on social media in the wake of Ike." Sure 'nuff, that's what I've been doing. I wasn't seeing much of anything on the news or weather channels and I was worried about my friends who live on the peninsula full time. So I went online looking for info. First I found ABC13's live video. There I heard a reporter reaming the ...

So, I'm trying to get more personal in my writing. I like how my friend Aviva on SickMomma keeps an updated record on her doctor's appointments, etc. on her blog. But this post is even more personal; it's about a crying meltdown I had recently. From Fibro Viv, on Being Credible: If my own family does not support me, what am I to do? During my recent vacation, I was reminded of the lack of support for my current plight (cannot work, waiting for SS disability hearing) I get from some of my family members. I've accepted my father's view that I should just keep on keepin' on. I/we don't discuss the subject of my health at all, except in the most cursory of terms. But when I learned of another family member's (by marriage) feeling that it's not right for me (or anyone else, apparently) to be receiving assistance (which I do, from whoever will give it to me), or applying for public housing (which I'm currently in the process of - I've been li...

Not. So I won't have that lousy sense of accomplishment from completing the NaBloPoMo challenge. I've gone the way of my predecessor with FM who tried to blog for a month, The Princess of the Business World and Fibromyalgia . I gave it up in favor of my health. Here are some nuggets from The Princess: "Blogging more was just that, more. It wasn’t better, it wasn’t really helpful. I pushed myself to the brink." "This experiment also could’ve been entitled “how to take all of the fun out of blogging & turn it into a very stressful environment”. I burnt out. I started hating blogging." "I did discover that I’m on the right track with how & why I work. Le sigh." So she didn't really fail, she discovered she was on the right track before this particular experiment. I suppose I could say the same. I was on the right track before I discovered that blogging every day won't work for me right now. But I also discovered a few things ...

This morning when I got up I still agreed with the conclusion I came to last night, that I can't do this NaBloPoMo post every day thing. It's too much. I got on the computer to make a post to that effect and instead I did the "Clear Your Clutter, Clear Your Mind" post. I thought 'I'm so close to getting the hang of doing a quick, short, quality (QSQ) post.' Do you see the length of that Clutter post??? Anyway, I guess I'm still in the running on NaBloPoMo and still trying to get the hang of the QSQ post.

It seems to me that this is one of those situations where the more you need the benefits of the practice, the harder it is to do. Like meditation. It's been my observation that the more unsettled my mind (life) is, the harder it is to just sit down and be quite for fifteen or twenty minutes. And the more we need the benefits that gratitude can bring like human growth, joy, creativity, vitality, delight, hope and connection, the harder it is to be grateful. I offer this post as a way to possibly evoke a sense of gratitude, in spite of the fact that we live with chronic illness. From Seasons of Grace: The Life Giving Practice of Gratitude (emphaisis added by me) "Gratitude — as conviction, practice, and discipline — is an essential nutrient, a kind of spiritual amino acid for human growth, joy, and creativity. Take away the daily experience and expression of gratitude, and life is quickly diminished. Like a weakened immune system , the spirit is left vulnerable to the disea...