The Idea Of Going Through A Chronic Illness And A Breakup Simultaneously

It seems that no matter what I write about or who I write about, my content almost always leads me to, one way or another, mention my struggles with epilepsy. All that I went through, in a way, defined who I am today, as a woman, a mother, a friend, a wife, a daughter; you name it. Epilepsy has affected my life immensely. Though the worst and toughest years of my life following my diagnosis are now behind me, it doesn’t mean that they don’t still affect me or that I don’t think about them from time to time. A friend was recently telling me about her old friend who stopped talking to her after breaking up with his girlfriend. He didn’t want to speak with her anymore because she was still friends with his ex, even though my friend was initially HIS friend in the first place, and she and his ex became friends through him.

I initially didn’t understand his thought process, mostly because I never went through a break up with someone I spent years in a relationship with. My husband and I have been together for about 13 years, and I can’t say we didn’t go through rough patches. If I did, I’d be lying. We went through multiple period of almost breaking off our relationship, and at one point, we even separated. The friend I’m talking about is initially my husband’s friend, and I became friends with her through their friendship as his plus one. Therefore, if my husband and I were to break up, I don’t think it’d be fair for me to tell her that she’d have to choose between me and him. I would, however, probably walk away and not be friends with her because she’s still friends with my husband.

I know it’s confusing.

But hear me out…

The best thing you can do for yourself after a breakup is give yourself a fresh start. It wouldn’t be like your past didn’t exist, but rather that you’re starting your life again as a whole new person, and your life can be compared to a blank page. You’re making new memories as the new person that you’re becoming. You don’t want to forget the past, but you also don’t want to constantly be reminded of it. And I guess I could, in a way, compare surviving the toughest years of my life following my epilepsy diagnosis to a breakup. I didn’t break up with my husband. I broke up with myself. I broke up with person I was during those toughest years of my life following my diagnosis.

The better my condition got, the more thinking and reflecting I had to do when it came to my lifestyle, my health, my well-being, my marriage, the people I surrounded myself with, and my future as a whole. I had to make some tough decisions. My first thought was a conversation I had with a particular family member. She’s married to to my cousin who previously battled cancer. She said something that really ticked me off and made me tell her the honest truth about her personal life.

You really get to know a couple by witnessing how they are in the mornings and at night. I got to know her and how she acts in a private family setting. What I realized was that she treated her spouse, my cousin, as someone who was still ill and needed to be taken care of even though it had been over a decade by that point that he’d been declared to be in remission many moons ago. My analysis told me everything that I needed to know about her, and personally, I was surprised that my cousin just took that type of treatment from his spouse, because I wouldn’t and neither would my husband. It’s much harder to watch someone you love be ill and become a person you don’t even recognize than to be ill yourself, and I’m speaking from my own personal experience. When you’re ill, you don’t comprehend as to what extent you’re ill. But once you become healthier and stronger, you want to be treated as ‘normal’.

And as you get back to your old self again and recover from an illness, chronic or otherwise, all you want is to start your life over and be the best version of yourself. You want to live life to the fullest because you spent months or years being sick. Those are months or years you want get back. With that being said, you want to surround yourself with people who support your needs and treat you with the utmost respect and dignity following your illness. You want to surround yourself with those people who don’t treat you as an ill-fated person. It doesn’t have to be friends. I can also be parents and spouses as well. In fact, it’s especially true for parents and spouses because they’re the closest people to you. The most heartbreaking thing in the world is to be treated like sh*t and be contentiously disrespected at home by people closest to you.

I want to go back to the beginning of this blog post, though. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reflecting as of late on my old life and everything that had happened to me because of all those years of hardships. I realize now that mostly everything that ever represented the toughest years of my life following the car accident that changed my life forever and my epilepsy diagnosis that followed is now gone. The only constants I have in my life from that time are my husband and my parents. And I even had to set some boundaries with them. My husband and I, at some point when I was on my path on improving my health and taking it as a priority rather than on a back-burner, considered divorcing. It wasn’t that we fell out of love, but rather that I needed to have a fresh start in my life, and he knew that. He was willing to give me up for the sake of my well-being.

I didn’t need to break things off with my husband. We needed to make changes in our relationship, yes. But not break up completely. Instead, I needed to break up with myself. I needed to let go of the version of myself that I so disliked in order to feel completely free so I can move forward with my life. I was recently reminded of the movie, ‘How To Be Single’, which starred Dakota Johnson, Rebel Wilson, and Alison Brie. The main character in the movie, Alison, suddenly breaks up with her boyfriend of 4 years in order to figure out who she is without him and to live the ‘single life’. She wanted to know what life looked like without him by her side. When she realized the single life wasn’t for her, she set up a meeting with her ex-boyfriend to ask him to get back together. But she didn’t ask him to get back together, but rather demanded it and just assumed he’d be waiting around for her. But he didn’t, and he made sure to let her know of that.

One particular thing Alison’s ex-boyfriend said was that he didn’t need an experiment to know that he loved her, and that was something that resonated with me. I didn’t need an experiment to know that I loved my husband. I didn’t want to know what life would be like without him. I already knew what life would be like without him as I had a life before him. I needed an experiment to know that I loved myself. Hence, I let go of the old version of me; the ill version of me was gone. And that experiment worked. I was happier and healthier. I was glowing inside. I knew myself again, and it made me realize that I would’ve never even laid eyes on the old version of me. I wouldn’t be friends with her. I wouldn’t even be able to hold a conversation with her.

When I was 5 months pregnant with my son, I was out with a friend when she suddenly, out of the blue, said to me, ‘You’ve changed so much since becoming pregnant, and it’s awesome to see.’ I was so happy that others noticed I’d been making changes in my life. But it wasn’t my pregnancy that changed me. It was my mindset and my willingness to improve myself that changed me and made me better. Now that I have my son who’s watching my every move and whose entire future is dependant on me and his father, I have no other choice but to be the best version of myself.

I knew I couldn’t continue living my life the way I did before. My chronic illness didn’t allow me to live a ‘normal life’. So I had to find my new normal. It was hard. It took me years to find my new normal and stick to it. I had to make some tough decisions and drastic changes in my life to make that happen. But the most drastic change that I had to make was with myself, because my life depended on it. I don’t hold grudges with my past, nor do I hold grudges with my old self. Nothing good would’ve came out of it if I did. Nothing good ever comes out from continuing to look at your past. Instead, I choose to concentrate on my present and my future, because that’s what really matters and that’s the version of me that really matters and will make a difference, and one that has already made a difference, in my life. Going through this process was a grieving process, in a way, and there’s no time stamp on it. Christina Applegate said this herself in her recent interview with Robin Roberts about her MS diagnosis.

“I’m never going to wake up and go, ‘This is awesome.’ I’m just going to tell you that. Like, it’s just not going to happen. I wake up and I’m reminded of it every day. So it’s not going to happen. But I might get to a place where I will function a little bit better. Right now, I’m isolating. And that’s kind of how I’m dealing with it is by not going anywhere because I don’t want to do it… It’s hard.”

Living with epilepsy (and cerebral palsy) isn’t awesome. But it is what it is and I have to make the best out of the situation I was put in. With that being said, I don’t regret my past, nor do I regret the past version of my past when I was just diagnosed with epilepsy. On the contrary, I couldn’t be more grateful for them. For it weren’t for my past and the past version of myself, I would never have known how strong I really am. Yes, I still have epilepsy. Yes, the effects of the car accident will never fully go away. Yes, I still have my mental health struggles. BUT…. no matter what, I know that I’m a survivor and I can get through anything. I’m a superwoman.

The Idea of going through a chronic illness and a breakup has a lot to do with your mindset. It doesn’t matter if it’s a breakup with your romantic partner, a family member, a friend, a co-worker, or any other person. It’s all in the mindset. The beauty of having a chronic illness is that your body will communicate with you straight away when something isn’t right for you. I, for instance, start having seizures when I’m in the presence of something or someone that’s not good for me. My husband recently told me that I was so confident in every decision that I make for myself, at at times, he wished he had that same confidence. That’s just about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. That confidence came from experience and endurance of my past and the past version of me, and for that I’ll always be thankful. I see it as a treasure and will look back on with a smile.