There are a few things I will always remember. Now, this list will change as things happen, i.e. wedding, birth of children. However, when I look back to the time before these events I will remember the first time I ran 2.2km after a 2 year battle with an Ulcerative Colitis flare, or the feeling of winning my first soccer game as a goalkeeper. These aren’t exactly lifetime landmark events, but to me they will probably always stick out. This gets me right to my point. When you have a disease, and suffer day in and day out, it’s the little things that really stick out.
I sat down to write this article with a head full of ideas, but now that I’m writing, I can’t believe how hard it is to express them without an example. Let’s tackle the running one first. I’ve always been an active guy, but when my disease hit, that was taken away. My physical activity was linked to home where I could stop my workout whenever I needed to run to the bathroom. Running wasn’t even part of the question. Pretty ironic that I couldn’t even run, but ended up in soccer right? Well, it wasn’t exactly easy. I missed running. I used to do it all the time, and now I couldn’t even go on a walk with my fiancé without continually looking back at the house, waiting for the need to get back ASAP. It really sucked and I’d had enough. So one day, I just decided I would try it. Whatever happened happened, and if it ended badly, well I didn’t tell anyone I was going so they would never know and I wouldn’t be embarrassed. This in mind, I tied my shoe laces and headed out the door. I was on edge the entire run, waiting for the symptoms to kick in, but nothing. I rounded the last corner, got to the last block, and then I realized I was starting to get emotional. My eyes welled up with tears and when I reached my house, I did what you should never do after just finishing a run, I just fell on the lawn and gave way to the emotion. You would’ve just thought I won an Olympic gold medal… not quite… but to me, it was better than one. I’m sure people thought I was either crazy or in a massive amount of pain, but it was neither. It may not seem like a big deal to most, but to me I had just gotten a piece of my life back.
Now, the running thing was a personal victory and it’s something I look back on whenever I think I can’t do something. It’s one of my sources of motivation and morale boosting. But there is another point to be illustrated. That is, people won’t always understand the little things that make you proud but it shouldn’t diminish what you’ve accomplished. This is huge!! I’ve found that at times people have made my accomplishments seem minor, when to me, they were a huge feat. The key is in remembering that not everyone will understand your disease or your limitations and battles, and for these reasons, they won’t be able to comprehend your victories or certain things you do. After all, you don’t do these things for them, but….. it’s nice to share in accomplishment with people. Let me elaborate with my own example.
When I first figured out that I wanted to chase the soccer dream, to attempt an Open-tryout being 26 years old and battling a disease, I realized the most important thing I needed was experience and so signed up for Intramural soccer at my school. I’ve put all the game stats on the AFL site, so I won’t rehash them here except for one important fact: we went undefeated until the play-offs and I had the least goals against in the league (ya I checked, I’m that into it and competitive). I was so proud of this. I had never played as a keeper in a league before, and I overcame a disease in order to do it. I remember telling a few people about it, but the response was the same time and time again, “it’s just intramurals…..” Wow, what a way to belittle my accomplishment. At first I got mad, but after time, I realized that it wasn’t that the accomplishment was worthless, it was just that they didn’t understand what it meant to me. And it is this that really illustrates the beauty and frustration in what it means when you accomplish something, no matter how big or small, when you also battle a chronic disease.
Like I said, it really did hurt at first when people didn’t understand the importance of my little accomplishments. It’s something that you would figure I would be used to. It is, after all, a common theme that healthy people tend to misunderstand the nature of your disease. If they can’t understand the disease, how can they understand the importance of the seemingly meaningless accomplishments? The answer lies in the fact that sometimes we aren’t truly saying what we think we are. It took me almost a year before I could really tell my parents, without dancing around the issue, what was going on with my health. Until I did, they truly never understood my behavior, my moods, or my reasoning. To an extent they might not still, but they try, which is the important thing. Yet, this goes hand in hand with the last article that was out. In the end, your accomplishments should only be meaningful to you. Yes, it’s nice to share them with those around you, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes the ones we are trying to share with just don’t understand. Maybe they don’t have the capacity to understand, or maybe it is just easier for them not to. It took me a long time to realize this, but sometimes the people that love us the most understand the least because they don’t want to believe that you are suffering, and this can translate into all forms of anything revolving around your disease.
At the end of the day, the thing that matters most is that you are proud of what you are doing. Like I said, it’s nice to share with those you love and celebrate together, but the big thing I had to realize was that it doesn’t take away from your personal accomplishment if someone else doesn’t understand. It could very well be that one day they will understand, and together you will get to revisit those accomplishments at a later date. The important thing is to never get discouraged.