Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Sometimes we think by not facing reality head on, it makes it less true and more bearable.
But we use a lot of energy keeping the things we avoid suppressed.
Energy we could use for healing.
What are you ignoring or avoiding?
Just notice.
❤️ Amanda
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
-Socrates
I’m working on something new so keeping my posts short these days. This needs no explanation, and from a reasonably reliable source 😉, so I’ll just leave it there.
Build the new.
❤️ Amanda
Why do we feel like we have to earn the right to breathe?
One of the biggest struggles I had after diagnosis was letting myself rest without the constant inner soundtrack of “I should do more, I’m being lazy, Why can’t I just push through?” It was crazy making.
This struggle to rest without guilt is not unique to the chronic illness community, it’s a cultural epidemic.
From the time we’re children, we’re conditioned to tie our value to our productivity. It’s how the capitalist wheels keep turning.
This is reinforced constantly through media, marketing, and cultural attitudes. We didn’t realize it was happening, it’s just the way things are.
So everyone within the system is wired to believe that resting is selfish, lazy, or a sign that you’re a failure.
Generations of women have been proving their worth through domestic labour while the men had the “important” job of earning money.
Despite women now entering the workforce equally, the scales haven’t balanced.
Women are still managing most of the thousands of details that go into running a home and raising children. A lot of it is the invisible labour of managing birthdays, extended families, school activities, medical appointments, grocery lists, etc, etc, etc.
We take it on because we feel that it won’t get done otherwise. Often that’s true.
Husbands don’t think about it because they’re watching the football game, out on the golf course, or snacking on cheesies on the couch you just vacuumed.
This isn’t to bash on the husbands (okay, maybe a little), or to glorify the ability of women to multitask (though we do kick ass), but it is the way our society is set up.
What is the cost? Women make up 80% of autoimmune diseases. Our bodies are literally screaming at us, and often we don’t listen until they conk out completely. Ask me how I know.
We’re conditioned to abandon our own needs to act in the service of others from the time we’re tiny. We’re raised to be good daughters, nice friends, perfect mothers. Taking five minutes to think about our own needs means we’re being selfish.
When this plays out in the context of chronic illness, where you simply can’t fulfill the all the functions you used to push yourself through, you feel guilty. Then guilt turns to shame. And you feel like a burden.
Shifting gears and stepping off the hamster wheel of capitalism is a blow to the ego. It takes some serious recalibration of your mindset.
The guilt doesn’t just switch off. We can rewrite the script though.
We all need to claim a new role, women and men alike.
Women don’t have value because they clean the house and cook dinner and hold down a full-time job.
Men don’t have value because they bring home a paycheque and know how to fix the lawnmower.
Every single human on the planet has value and worth just because they’re here. Period. Full stop.
Nothing needs to be proven or earned, it’s just a fact. You have value because you are.
You matter, your needs matter, and we all need to rest.
Binging three seasons of Shrinking, or scrolling Instagram for two hours is not rest.
Neither is folding laundry while chatting to your best friend.
True rest is stilling your body and letting your mind wander.
Stare out a window, watch the leaves dance in the trees. Stare at your toes and daydream.
Five minutes a day can make a huge difference.
It takes practice. Your mind will want to go over your to-do list, or snark at you that you’re lazy.
Claim your time. Fight for it. It’s an investment in yourself that will pay off 1000x in the future.
If you want to read more about the necessity of resting, check out this article in Psychology Today.
Rest is not a reward for finishing everything. As if that’s even possible.
Resting is your superpower.
Rest. You deserve it.
❤️ Amanda
You’d think the hardest part of getting an MS diagnosis would be the crushing fatigue and slushy brain fog that made me feel like a 90 year old who lived on Happy Meals and never exercised. Instead, it was the grueling mental gymnastics of unfair expectations and disappointment in myself. I wasn’t just fighting MS, I was fighting myself.
I was a slave to the push-crash cycle and I couldn’t even see it. On the hard days, I’d feel worthless for not even being able to cook dinner. On the good days, I’d clean the house, weed the garden, bake cookies, cook dinner and exercise like I was still 25. Then, shocker, I’d end up in bed for two weeks.
It was a brutal case of identity whiplash. The grief of not being able to teach anymore, paired with the loss of identity tied to productivity that is so valued in our culture. It sucked. Big time.
I was walking my favourite beach, hosting the world’s worst pity party when the light finally turned on. I was exhausting myself more by trying to remain the same person, by resisting the change my body was begging for. It wasn’t about letting the MS win, it was respecting that my body was trying to tell me something and I needed to listen if I was ever going to feel better.
Three qualities I developed over time that changed the game and got me on the right track were patience, self-compassion and consistency.
Patience
I replaced the moaning, impatient soundtrack of unfairness with a simple sentence: It took a long time to get this sick, it will take time to heal.
It took many reminders to myself that healing isn’t linear, it’s a spiral that keeps building on previous layers. Slow is not the same as stopped.
The urgency and pressure I was creating for myself in my determination were just more stressors on an already taxed nervous system.
Self-compassion
Energy is in very short supply when you’re dealing with MS. Beating yourself up burns energy you could be using to heal.
It was when I shifted from inner critic to my own personal cheerleader that real progress began. Talking to myself the way I would to my kids or my best friend created safety in my body so healing could get a foothold.
Self-compassion isn’t lowering the bar, it’s removing unnecessary weight you were never meant to carry.
Consistency
My five minute rule, which felt ridiculous at first, allowed me to prevent the crash cycle and build up strength through consistency.
Five minutes of exercise, meditation, cleaning the house, whatever. Not pushing myself to burnout, just showing up for myself day after day. Progress over perfection as a daily practice, not a bumper sticker.
Small, boring and repeatable is what actually moves the needle.
Healing is possible
Over the last decade, I’ve healed more than I ever believed possible. Not by pushing harder, but by changing my relationship with the process.
These are some of the things that helped me over time, that I wish someone had pointed out to me in the early days. If they help just one person get on the road healing a bit faster, sharing them was worth it.
What qualities do you feel are essential for healing?
❤️ Amanda
I was on my morning walk yesterday, headphones in, half-listening to a financial podcast, something I never imagined myself doing. But here we are. When you find yourself single after thirty years, you do a lot of things you never imagined.
The podcast was by investing ninja Kristen Wonch, and she was explaining compound interest using the most relatable analogy I’ve ever heard: a rumour in high school.
Picture it. One person whispers something deliciously scandalous to two people. Those two people each tell two more. And so on and so on. After just 20 days? Two million people know that story.
But here’s where it gets wild. If that first person had told just three people instead of two, and each of those people told three, and so on, after 20 days, the number doesn’t climb to three million. It doesn’t even double.
It goes to 15 billion.
Let that sink in. One extra person. Compounded over time. An almost incomprehensible difference.
And that’s when it hit me. What if the thing spreading wasn’t gossip, but your healing?
When Everything Changed at Once
When my marriage ended after three decades, the fear that moved in alongside the grief wasn’t just emotional. It was financial. It was existential. It was: what does the rest of my life actually look like?
I did what I do. I researched. I listened to podcasts on my walks. I read everything I could get my hands on. And somewhere in that process of trying to figure out how to create financial stability, I started realizing that everything I was learning about financial habits applied, sometimes perfectly, to my health.
Because the truth is, both had been on autopilot for a long time. And autopilot, as it turns out, is not a strategy.
Tiny Habits Are Compound Interest for Your Health
I used to ask myself, in the slightly sarcastic voice I reserve for things I suspect are too good to be true: How much difference can it actually make to spend five minutes outside first thing in the morning? What does five minutes of meditation really do?
The answer, it turns out, is an insurmountable difference. Just not overnight.
Unlike the rumour mill, which spreads fast and furious and usually ends in someone crying in a bathroom, the compounding of healthy habits happens slowly. Quietly. Through tiny shifts that you almost don’t notice until one day you do.
A five-minute walk becomes a twenty-minute walk. The morning air clears your head enough that you sleep better. You sleep better so you have a little more energy. A little more energy means you feel like cooking instead of ordering in. Better food means your body feels different. Your body feeling different means you actually want to move it. And on it goes.
Each habit creates the conditions for the next one. That’s the flywheel. That’s the compound interest. The return on investment isn’t obvious at first, but it’s absolutely, undeniably real.
The Titanic and the 1% Shift
I’ve been thinking about the Titanic a lot lately. Bear with me.
That ship did not sink because of the iceberg, exactly. It sank because by the time the iceberg was a problem, the ship was already committed to its course. I’m speculating here, obviously, but I imagine the thinking was something like: well, this thing is too massive to turn, so let’s just keep going and hope for the best.
We all know how that ended.
But what if the captain had started a 1% course correction the moment he first heard about the ice? What if the adjustment had been small enough to feel almost pointless, but consistent, and early?
The tragedy might have been entirely averted.
We’re all captains of our own ships. And most of us, at some point, have had an iceberg on the horizon that we kept sailing toward because change felt too big, too slow, too hard to bother with. I’ll start Monday. I’ll start in January. I’ll start when things calm down.
The thing is, the ship’s already moving. You might as well start turning.
From Hindsight to Foresight
Here’s something I’ve made peace with recently: I wish I’d started investing in my twenties. My dad told me to. I didn’t listen. It was too complicated. I didn’t have the ‘extra’ money. All the usual excuses. Now that I understand how compound interest works, I can see exactly what that cost me.
For a while, that knowledge felt like punishment. Like proof that I had done life wrong.
But I’ve stopped doing that. Because beating yourself up about what you didn’t start ten years ago is the opposite of useful. It’s actually just another version of the Titanic problem, staying committed to a course that isn’t working because changing it feels too late.
It’s not too late. It’s never too late. And here’s the reframe that changed everything for me:
Instead of looking back at the last ten years with regret, and ‘shoulding’ all over myself, I use the power of foresight to look forward at the next ten. Where do I want to be? What does that person look like? And what’s the smallest, most manageable 1% shift I can make today to start becoming her?
True with money. True with health. Always.
Nobody Is Coming With a Life Raft
I want to say something that might sting a little, but I mean it with love.
Nobody is coming to save you.
Not a doctor who hands you a magic prescription. Not a diet that fixes everything in thirty days. Not a wellness trend, a detox, or a supplement. The life raft is not coming because you’re not drowning. You’re swimming. And you’re more capable than you’ve been led to believe.
You have a tremendous amount of control over your own health. More than the healthcare system tends to tell you. More than you might feel right now, especially if you’re in the middle of something hard. Even MS.
It doesn’t matter what habit you start with. It only matters that you do. Five minutes outside. One glass of water before your coffee. A single deep breath before you look at your phone in the morning. Something so small it almost feels silly.
Start there. Let it compound.
The Best Investment You’ll Ever Make. And It’s Free.
Financial security is important. I won’t pretend otherwise, I spent enough sleepless nights worrying about it to know that money stress is real and it’s heavy.
But there’s no better investment than your health. Not one. Because without it, nothing else works. Not the retirement fund, not the dream trip, not the relationship or the career or the creative project you keep putting off.
And my favourite part of this whole analogy? Most of the habits that change your life the most are completely, entirely free.
Sleep. Movement. Sunlight. Water. Stillness. Connection. Breathing. These are not luxuries. They’re the compound interest machine, and you already own it.
So I’ll leave you with the question I keep asking myself:
Where could you be in ten years if you add one tiny habit today?
The rumour has to start somewhere. Let it start with you.
❤️Amanda
Walk a Myelin My Shoes 