Lemons with Lyme

Hello, everyone! Oh man, it has been forever since I last posted and I apologize for that! You’d think that I would have had more free time dedicated to my blog during quarantine, but that didn’t really happen. Lately, I have felt the need to post again, but I have kept pushing it off for days, which turned into weeks, then months… you get the gist, but anyways, I am back now and ready to chat!

So, I think that we can all agree that it has been a long, hard 8 months. Half of me wants to go on about how much we have learned and progressed from this experience, but the other half of me wants to type IN ALL CAPS ABOUT HOW CRAPPY THIS HAS BEEN! I’m sure we are all feeling different ratios of those emotions. However, I believe that it is time that we move past this. Let’s pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and start over again. The best way to get through this is with a positive attitude and I have always felt this way! On this note of attitude (I bet you can guess what this post will be about!), I wanted to go over how it can affect ourselves, others, and our situations. Okay, I’m sure you are all expecting me to give a speech about how we need to be positive and keep our heads up; look forward, yata, yata, yata. But actually, I think that we have heard a lot of this (I’ve probably even wrote about this myself already), so instead I am going to jump straight into negativity.

Negativity; the absolute definition of struggle, pain, trial, and everything else on this side of the spectrum. A negative attitude is the quickest and easiest way to worsen any situation. I think we have all heard this stuff before, which in the end could cause confusion. In order to best describe my point, I’d better share a brief synopsis of what I’ve been up to the past month. As school started, I was absolutely thrilled to get back into the routine as well as experience everything that I felt I had missed over the summer. I’m not sure how much I have touched on this already, but my whole 9th grade year (last school year), I had missed so much school and with that so many classes and so many opportunities. Even on the weekends, my free time was spent sleeping in (as I couldn’t get out of bed), watching TV, and doing other things indoors due to the limits Lyme has set on me. I was always bored. I felt like I had missed out on everything. Suddenly, I felt like I wasn’t myself anymore; like I was no longer an everyday teen. Picturing this, quarantine actually wasn’t all that different for me personally. It just meant that I was no longer attending dance and I had no option to attend school or hang with friends if I was feeling up to it. It almost felt like a more limited extension of the life I had already been living. So because of this, I think we can imagine the excitement I felt getting to go back to school. The first couple weeks back were pretty hard for me as I was adjusting to a sleep schedule, a mask, and the work load, but overall I was doing alright. The week after, dance had started up, and it became a greater challenge for me to participate in both. Having Lyme, well, basically it’s like riding a rollercoaster, blindfolded, while the cart hangs halfway on the track. You really have no idea what could happen next. After a couple or so weeks of this two-for-two dance and school shebang, I crashed. The next month, I had been home totaling in missing 5 weeks of school, and 2.5 weeks of dance! I think I’m setting a record! Let’s just say that the cart completely fell off the track, or at least I’m assuming it did as I’m STILL wearing a blindfold. Sorry, I am getting a little bit sidetracked, but THE POINT IS, with my physical fall aside, I noticed a great change in my emotions. That first month of school, I noticed that I was setting myself up for failure. I held back every ounce of stress, anxiety, and depression that a month later, I couldn’t handle it anymore. It completely disrupted and destroyed my all of my hope as well as my positivity. I downright caved in and I am still currently trying to get better physically as well as mentally.

I know, that this story seemed a little negative compared to what I normally write. It was quite ironic considering how I started out saying that negativity isn’t going to get us anywhere. Now, if you noticed in my story, I broke down due to holding in every negative emotion I could. I still stand by my past statement. Negativity will not make the situation any better. I’ve always learned this way and I still believe it. Where I went wrong a couple months ago was, I didn’t realize the difference between a negative attitude and simply just the emotions I was actually feeling. I didn’t fully understand that it was absolutely alright to feel stressed, anxious, and depressed and it was definitely okay to act upon those feelings. What I learned from this experience is, there is a limit to how positive you can and should be. It’s perfectly human to feel anger and sadness. We don’t have to plaster a smile on our face every time we go out in public and we shouldn’t be expected to. There is a fine line between a negative attitude and a negative emotion. I actually wouldn’t refer to sadness or anger as negative emotions perse. I think that all emotions are essential for positive growth and development, so there is no reason to hide them and pretend they aren’t there. With all of this in mind, I wanted to share that I no longer am going to simply post about all of the positive things regarding my disease. I think that there is room for sadness and struggle in what I write, because in all reality, life is hard. Lyme sucks, but through this, I can always look for what is positive and uplifting in that. This is why I love the quote, “Look on the bright side.” I like how it indicates that there is not only a positive side, but a negative side that we can draw it from. I hope that this has been beneficial in some sort of way, because in all honesty, I just really needed to rant. So THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU guys for accepting me in each post no matter what emotions I am portraying. I hope this inspires you to look on your emotions and how you progress through difficult things in a new way. Thanks again guys, love you all!