When I was young, way back in the olden days, I was in such a hurry to grow up. As a tween, a phrase that didn’t even exist in the 1980s, I wanted to make my own decisions, eat lots of junk food and stay up as late as I wanted. As a 15 year old, I thought it was very adult to be going to the bar, doing tequila shots and dancing on the speakers. Yikes! The sweet absurdity of being in such a hurry to become someone older.
When my kids were little, I often reminded them that life only goes in one direction, so don’t be in a hurry to grow up. Then I was diagnosed with MS, and I found myself wanting to go back to the before: before I got sick, before my kids had to worry about having a sick mother, before I had to give up my job. I was wishing for a time machine when that phrase popped back into my head. Talk about irony.
It was from my experience as a misguided youth that I gained the wisdom to pass that phrase on to my children, to encourage them to slow down and not wish away their childhood. Yet, there I was, newly diagnosed, desperately wishing there was a rewind button for life. How easy it is to dispense retrospective wisdom, not knowing how much you’ll need it one day yourself.
With the diagnosis, everything I thought I knew about moving forward got turned inside out. MS took not just my health, but the sweet oblivion of how precarious health can be. The luxury of not constantly thinking and worrying about my body. The career I loved, teaching 6 year olds to read, count and sing in French. The before and after line that changed everything and left me with the desperate, completely human wish to go backwards.
When the phrase popped back into my head, at first it felt cruel, like a mockery of the bleak future promised by the neurologist. Life only goes in direction. The doors to reclaim my health locked from the other side. The crushing grief of accepting there is no before to return to.
It took years to move through that resistance to something like peace. I’d hear people say “my illness has been a blessing’, and think they were completely unhinged. Slowly, reluctantly, I started to understand what they meant. There’s a clarity that comes from being forced to stop. From learning to be a human being instead of a human doing.
The brutal, beautiful truth is that suffering is one of life’s most effective teachers. The things that MS has given me that nothing else could: presence, gratitude and a recalibrated sense of what matters. Not a silver lining so much as a different kind of light.
Something you can try this week: Spend five minutes with the “before”. Let yourself miss it and feel the grief. Then consciously close that door and ask, “what is available to me today?” You don’t have to feel grateful yet, just curious.
❤️ Amanda
Walk a Myelin My Shoes 