Some thoughts on health & recovery from writers

cafe_bustelo

cafe_bustelo

Well known member
I've been writing these down here and there. Here are a few:

"For years I had been unhappy, consciously & deliberately... I isolated myself more & more, undertook less & less & lent myself to a crescendo of disparagement of others & myself. But in all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid ... It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself."

- Samuel Beckett (who according to his letters recovered "with great reluctance" from various skin conditions/pelvic pain etc)

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered."

- Aldous Huxley

"Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more."

- C.S. Lewis
 
@cafe_bustelo , I had a friend write something very similar today.
She wrote that she is the ambassador of complaints. If there was the highest award for being a complainer, she'd have two of them :)
She does not invalidate her complaints - most of them where justified. It's just that she lived them. Lived in them, let them all rule her mind and they stole her joy and purpose.
She's learned that these complaints are really only just thoughts and that you don't have to live only in your head - that your body is there to be lived in too and that the life we've been given is so that we can eek out at least a little joy from time to time.
My friend never suffered from chronic pain, but she was crippled by a chronically negative mindset. She has changed her job, her place of living, focuses on family instead of people who were never very kind or caring of her not out of spite, but out of self-love.
 
Cactusflower said:
@cafe_bustelo
She's learned that these complaints are really only just thoughts and that you don't have to live only in your head - that your body is there to be lived in too and that the life we've been given is so that we can eek out at least a little joy from time to time.
Click to expand...

Wow, that is an amazing bit of advice. Totally resonates with me; I have always very much lived in my head and didn't know it was possible to do otherwise, I thought that's just how I am.

I am trying to see it as a blessing (or fortunate at least) that I am going through this now, relatively early in my life, because I know that if I'd continued the way I was going I would have continued living with the chronically negative mindset forever and my world would have just kept shrinking.
 
These are awesome finds, @cafe_bustelo! It's a great reminder that the human condition is universal across all the dimensions of location, culture, and time. Please keep adding to them!
 
Hi everyone, glad to see the forum back up and running!

I've been reading Stuart Murdoch's ME/CFS lightly fictionalized recovery memoir Nobody's Empire which is full of amazing stuff. He doesn't mention TMS by name but the story he tells about his recovery aligns with the TMS protocol, in terms of getting back to life and living fully.

Here's an excerpt from it I've been dying to share:

"I read a story somewhere about an athlete. She trained so hard, running was everything to her. There was a huge race in a stadium, one that she'd been building towards for years. She felt good, she felt like she would win. The race was harder than she thought, she was bogged down in the pack. When they broke for the last lap, she went with the leaders, but as they approached the last bend, she felt them stretching away. She had nothing left; she faded. She ran from the stadium after the race, lost and inconsolable. She ran, and her body and mind were separated in madness. She ran, she jumped over a barrier in a car park and fell three floors onto concrete. She was crippled, her beautiful legs smashed to pieces.

That was the end of the news story. I don't know what happened next. But I think about that girl, that athlete, that woman. I had it all a few years ago. I had health, energy, opportunities, freedom, friends, family. I was driven, but I didn't know where I was driving.

I was pulled apart by forces. If I couldn't be the best, if things didn't go my way, I got angry, I got frustrated. Maybe I had to be laid so low to start seeing the beauty again. My fall [onset of symptoms] lasted a year and a half rather than the two seconds it took her to fall three floors. In my unconscious crumpling, in my protracted collapse, I was protesting against life.

Life had pulled me back, it had tried to show me the error of my ways. Now I see the good stuff, now I see the possibilities from a different place. I feel so fortunate that I didn't die three years ago. I've got the rest of my life to make up for my mistakes. I was saved for something. I hope to God that the athlete eventually realized that she was saved for something too."
 
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Hi @cafe_bustelo,
Thanks for this great share. I can relate to it very much. My TMS has absolutely ground my life to a halt from what it was. I feel like I’m absolutely being rebuilt from the bottom up and the inside out. I think that’s the gift of getting TMS. But it takes a while to appreciate the gift. lol and of course, most of the time it’s hard to be thankful about it. It’s a lot of hard work. But we don’t really have a choice.
 
From Paulo Cuelho's The Alchemist:

The boy continued to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. He came to understand its dodges and tricks, and to accept it as it was. He lost his fear, and forgot about his need to go back to the oasis, because, one afternoon, his heart told him that it was happy. "Even though I complain sometimes," it said, "it's because I'm the heart of a person, and people's hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself."
 
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