a letter to Elizabeth – figuring it out as i write…

This morning I wrote to Elizabeth from Screw Bronze! in response to her request for addresses from people who would like to receive her postcards… In writing that email I figured out a bunch of stuff that had been floating around in my mind for a while but not managed to form into anything coherent. Here is a version of that letter…

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Dear Elizabeth – i’m hereby answering your call and offering myself as a willing recipient of a postcard! 

I haven’t written to you before but have been reading your blog everyday for a few months now and it is firmly part of my daily routine. I read it to my partner Kathryn when she is able to listen over coffee in the morning.

I can’t remember how I found your blog but I remembered you right away from the news coverage of the carpet layers that held you hostage! Your writing and the connection to the rest of the disability blogosphere has been incredibly helpful for both my partner and myself.

Kathryn was struck three and a half years ago with a sudden catastrophic headache that has never let up – you know, lightening bolt to the side of her head, fell off the toilet onto the floor – the standard nothing on the MRI/CAT/LP, “we don’t know what’s wrong with you and there is nothing to be done but pain meds” medical mystery that I know you understand… I was her caretaker for a couple of years before my own health declined rather intensely and I am now also on disability with severe FM/CFS and arthritis of as yet undetermined variety.

Your blog and the rest of the disability bloggers that you have introduced me to (you have some great friends that love you very much!) have been instrumental in my developing understanding of myself as disabled rather than only sick. I have found some power in seeing my life through a disability lens – I am chronically ill but i am also disabled and I am no longer waiting to get better so that i can get back to my old life. I am accepting that my life is never going to be the same and that there are going to be challenged to be met in order to live as large as life as possible. By accepting disability, I am accepting help and mobility aides and am living more (and in living more i am also accepting when my life by necessity occurs on my couch for a few days!).

I have been able to move out of some of the depression that came with my illness and caretaking for kathryn and I thank you for your example. You are living huge and hard and powerfully – even more than I lived when i was healthier to be frank! You are powerfully demonstrating the impact that action and drive have on your life and on the lives around you. (Have I mentioned how loved you are? It feels strange to be saying that to someone I have never met but it is seriously obvious reading your comments and how often you are mentioned in other people’s writing that you are held tightly in the arms of many.)

The lesson i am being offered in this illness is about surrender – but for a long time I was shutting down, thinking that my life needed to be put on hold, stopped – I now understand that i need to surrender to asking for and accepting help (and in that – love), surrender to a life that, though different, does not need to be smaller. Surrender the picture of the life I thought I was going to have when I was 30 and paint the new image of the new Self and life that is emerging. This is all about transformation, I guess.

I have started writing a blog of my own – i haven’t shared the address with anyone yet – but I thought that I should send you the link to the post i wrote that was inspired by your post about disability.

Well, that’s probably enough rambling from a stranger up the road!

In love, challenge and powerful ACTIVE surrender!
Christina

PS – Victoria wouldn’t know what hit ‘em with you for Mayor!