‘I’ll never be the same again.’ I said those six words three weeks after my MS diagnosis, not knowing I was building a prison.
The moment I first said those words, I was trying to feel excited about all the growth in my garden. Instead, I was terrified and overwhelmed with all the work that growth was making for me.
My body felt like I’d been squeezed through a pasta maker and dragged behind a pickup. I couldn’t find the energetic, motivated person I’d always thought myself to be. (I’d actually always struggled with fatigue but I had a close personal relationship with Denial.)
I repeated variations of that sentence daily for 3 years, swirling in the fog of confusion and grief a life-changing diagnosis brings.
Saying ‘I have MS’ is just a fact. But it’s the way I said it, with defeat, with finality, like it was my entire identity. That’s what kept me stuck. There’s a difference between ‘I have MS’ and ‘I AM sick.’
Your brain builds neural pathways like garden paths. The thoughts you repeat are the ones you “walk” most often. Over time, those paths become smooth and automatic. For better or for worse.
Because your brain’s job is to keep you safe, it takes your repeated thoughts as truth, so whatever you tell it often enough, it starts to believe and look for proof.
When you start choosing new, healing thoughts, you’re simply walking a new path. With practice, your brain learns to follow it naturally.
One morning I woke up thinking ‘I don’t think I can get out of bed today.’ So I didn’t. I spent 14 hours scrolling my iPad, feeling like a burden, spiraling into anxiety about the future. The next morning, before my brain could start its doom loop, I thought ‘What’s one small thing I can do?’ I watered the plants. That was it. But I wasn’t in bed all day.
When I worried that people thought I was faking because I could walk, or that I wasn’t ‘sick enough’ to be on disability, the vertigo would kick in and my ears would ring. Not exactly at that moment, it took some reflection to realize the connection, but the symptoms weren’t just random examples of my body betraying me. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy in action.
Staring at my garden one day, trying to squash the overwhelm at the weeding and pruning calling to me through the fatigue, I watched the hummingbirds flit from one buddleia to another. I envied their boundless energy and wished I could breathe it in.
Then I wondered what it would be like to be an animal and not have the overthinking, negative-biased human brain. That flipped the switch, and I thought, “What if I shift my perspective?”
Adjusting the lens of how I looked at things, from “I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired” to “What can I do to help myself heal?” was the game-changing move that stopped the carousel of terror and started a true healing path.
These days, when I catch myself thinking ‘I’ll never…’, I pause. Sometimes I can shift it immediately: ‘Not never. Just not today.’ Sometimes I can’t, and that’s okay too.
That garden I was standing in when I first said those six words? I learned to tend it in a different way. Some days with energy, some days from a chair, sometimes just watching the hummingbirds from the window. But I was no longer terrified of the growth, because I was part of it.
The prison was never MS. It was the story I told myself about MS. And I’m the one who holds the key.
What six words have you been saying to yourself? Write them down. Just notice them. That’s where the door starts to open.
❤️Amanda
Walk a Myelin My Shoes 