New Year, Same Body
For years I have scorned upon New Years resolutions with sheer hatred in my heart. How come everyone else gets to become newer, supposed better, versions of themselves year after year while I was stuck dealing with a broken body with the crippling ability to get in the way and limit, any kind of resolution I could come up with. How was I supposed to live laugh love in these kinds of conditions?
New years can be a tough time for a lot of people, but I think the chronically ill community can feel the toughness, and sometimes even the unjustness, of the season the most. C'mon it's pretty hard not to feel like this with the way the world works nowadays, ESPECIALLY with social media. We are stuck in a perpetual state of comparing ourselves, something I feel the chronic illness community is all too familiar with. But this familiarness does not have the ability to make the season any easier on us. It's just another reminder.
For years now I have faced this holiday head on thinking I had cracked some sort of code on how to both embrace the holiday tradition of new year resolutions while also honoring the unpredictability of my body and disease. Every year by about the third week of January I would feel the same crippling jealousy, frustration, exhaustion, and sadness.
Why the fuck can I not be like everyone else? Why can I not achieve all of the same badass goals as them? Why did going after what I supposedly wanted in life create this disparity of health within myself?
It's because we are ever changing beings to begin with, and having a disease on top of it means we need to be even more open to going with the flow and modifying our goals and desires in life. It means to always have a contingency plan.
This realization was buried deep within me, underneath years of trying to be someone and something I was never going to be--a fully healthy individual with a semi predictable life. I was always going to be me, Katie, a wildly passionate living human who also by chance had an unpredictable disease.
Once I let go of the mindset that I could keep trying to fit my life into the cookie cutter shape like a healthier individual's, I was able to go more with the flow of my life, and not let the resolutions (I hate this word, they have and always will be new HABITS to me) flow with the seasons of my body. Seasons makes it sound like my body doesn’t change for long periods of time, for me it can change almost hour to hour on some days, I just like to the sound of the word here really.
My suggestion to anyone who is trying to come to terms with the fact that their body can stay in the same unhealthy state year to year, is to feel into it. Grieve it all, let it out. It's never going to go away until you head it all face on, it's an emotion that demands to be felt. You are worthy of grieving the life you could have had the ability to make if it were not for your illness. But you are ALSO worthy of not letting it beat you down mentally for the rest of your life as well. This was the thought that would always bring me out of any new grieving moments.
One of my personal challenges year to year for the past three years, has been the continuous presence of my setons. I had them placed at the end of January 2019, under the impression that they were a temporary fix to my then present abscess. I figured that eventually my fistulas would be able to clear up on their own and I would have the setons out. Instead, the fistulas continued on, and I got to end my college experience with them, and start my post college adult life with them as well. It means that I have been fighting a hard fight to go into remission for three long years now, making any life changes always seem even more daunting than before the arrival of said fistulas. Aren't the setons enough to deal with in life without navigating any additional change on top of them?
Honestly yes, but during these past three years I have also been trying to figure out who I am supposed to be out here in this adult world. I have also been challenging my mental health as well by working deeply on trying to heal from my childhood, and the other traumatic events in my life. But throughout all of this, I knew that I needed to become the kind of adult that would be able to help myself through all of these different challenges. I wanted to be the version of me I would have been if I was never sick, but a modified more flowy version of her.
Growing up exercise was never a big thing in my house. We were never taught what a healthy amount of exercise looked like. On top of that, since I was my sickest while growing up, me and the outside world just never seemed to figure it out. But I knew if I wanted to ever get these setons out, I would have to start exercising in some capacity. It's been my "new habit" focus for years, but it was not until 2021 where I really started to take it seriously. Enter into my life: yoga. The one exercise everyone else recommends to try to "heal" your IBD, which is a complete joke. But I finally decided maybe there was something to be said about yoga. There was--I was hooked from the very start.
My body balked at the adjustment from it's relatively stagnant life, besides power walking everywhere, which I was really good at, I was stagnant. The muscles that I never knew I had, had to finally come to life, break and then heal and strengthen themselves over and over again. It was like ripping open a present you never knew you had. At first I expected myself to incorporate it religiously into my daily life, and expected myself to become a pro within just a couple of months.
Yea….no, that is NOT how my body works. I had to learn what would actually work for me, and how I would be able to manage this new daily practice. I needed to feel into and see what actually felt good for my body on a daily basis. Sometimes that would look like waking up super early and getting on my mat for a long and extensive flow. While other mornings it may look like sleeping in, and then dragging myself for a slower flow on my mat. I heard the inner critics in my mind not adapting to these changes in my routine, but I started to stop listening to them. I started to become more okay with the idea of accepting my body where it is at on a day to day basis without as many expectations or disappointments.
Without providing myself with a rigid resolution of "working out every morning at 6am for an hour" but instead promising to myself that I would try and move my body every day in a way that made me FEEL good; it allows me to not be hard on myself on the days I cannot show up on my mat. But also helps encourages me to focus on the end result of working out--to feel good.
This was the first year where I felt confident to plan out my future year, but only focusing on how I wanted to FEEL. So instead of being pressured to come up with new ways of being me, or "rebranding", I instead focused on how I could reach my higher self, what she looks like, and how I can feel while getting to be her. There isn't any pressure when I look at the year in this light, and it allows me to dream up bigger visions for myself. These larger visions MAY not come true but the FEELING affiliated will. That I know for sure.
So for all of my fellow badasses out there that feel overwhelmed by setting new "habits" for the new year try instead to focus on how you want to FEEL emotionally in the new year. It will help you outline and narrow down how you want to think, act, and be. Once you can become clear on this more magic can happen in your life.
