A New Perspective on Resilience

This last week has sent me absolutely insane, mentally and physically, I truly feel like I’ve lost my mind, but in the process of losing my mind, I feel like I’ve come to a slight revelation, and I want to be completely honest about it.

The last five months or so have been incredibly turbulent; health issue after health issue, it doesn’t seem to have stopped for me in any which way. Starting back at Christmas with the severe hemoptysis which had me in hospital up until Christmas Eve, to another episode (albeit far more minor) in January, and then fast forward to mid-March when I got a hold of an “unknown bacteria” which left me in hospital again on more IV antibiotics and to finally last week.

Pretty standard stuff, started coughing blood on the Thursday, got an emergency prescription (which was an absolute ballache to get a hold of) for a blood clotter to prevent my lungs from bleeding badly again. But, as with most medication, the side effects proved to be just as much of an issue as the original problem. So, naturally, after realising that a side effect of a blood clotter is Thrombosis (shock), I became acutely aware of every single sensation in my body. Almost on the dot, I started noticing (or thought I was noticing) chest pains, faintness, headaches, even tense calves (usually where blood clots are found) meaning that for a solid week, I convinced myself I had had either a heart attack, stroke or a blood clot, and when I say convinced, I mean I was literally sobbing whilst trawling through the NHS website anticipating when I was going to die. All very unpleasant.

It does not help that I’m in the last month of my undergraduate degree, so the stress level is off the charts regardless of how close to death I am that day. I’ve been advised to take mitigating circumstances giving me an extra 3 months to get things done which is becoming increasingly more appealing (before this, it was suggested that I DROP OUT… I never thought I was a particularly persistent person but, in the moment, when I said “like fuck am I going to do that”, I realised that maybe I was). All this lung stuff just had to kick off at this crucial time.

Anyway, as I was saying, this week has been dreadful, the girls have been excellent at keeping my feet on the ground, running to Sainsbury to pick up bags of ice, establishing contingency plans or simply watching The Vicar of Dibley with me (I think they’re all just as traumatised as me now – one cough and everyone comes RUNNING), but it dawned on me that I silently think in the back of my mind that, rather selfishly I must add, I’d rather be dead than deal with the physical and mental impacts of poor health.

I know I bang on a lot on my Instagram and on this blog about the 🌈😊🦋positives🌈😊🦋 of all these experiences (health or otherwise), no matter how traumatic they are. About how each experience makes you realise something about yourself or there’s a higher reason that things have gone this way, and although that’s what everyone loves to hear and nobody ever fails to lap it up, I realised I was doing myself an injustice by not just letting myself accept or embrace how I truly feel about this sort of thing sometimes and forcing myself down a path of positivity.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do wholeheartedly believe everything that comes out of my mouth or falls onto my keyboard but sometimes it’s as simple as, on occasion, life is just shit and there’s nothing you can do about it apart from suck it up and try to move forward. It’s painfully unfair, you can’t comprehend why you’re deserving of one trauma after another, you desperately wish that someone else could take your place.

Somehow, after embracing this fact, I don’t feel quite so angry anymore, by trying to put a positive spin on everything, it still rubs the wrong way… “yes I understand everything happens for a reason and that it’ll only strengthen my resilience, I get the point that it’s good experience or it’s here to teach me a lesson but WHY ??? If I didn’t experience any of this trauma, I wouldn’t need the strength or resilience??”. But then of course, it’s goes along the lines of “if you’re not going to do it for yourself, then do it for the others that might one day be in a similar position”.

It's a never ending, exhaustive loop of “whys” but by accepting that sometimes life just gives you a bag of shit because that’s what it means to be human and there perhaps isn’t a greater reason for it. It opens up another (maybe not so admirable) avenue of resilience; one where you can grit your teeth and get on with your life without the expectation of a positive conclusion from an unfortunate experience.

You may have read this blog and thought “bloody hell she’s lost her fire a bit, hasn’t she?”, well you may be right, but I prefer to think of it as ✨ascending another level of character development✨.