(image Credit: The Rhodesian]

just because you’re present doesn’t mean that you’re here . . . rise above it.

rise above it, switchfoot

With any sort of chronic disease, it’s all too easy to feel trapped by your own body. Like I’ve said before, it’s perspective . . . and perspective can be changed, but that sometimes doesn’t make it any easier to do. And the thing is, much as I’d like to–as easy as it might be–to separate my asthma-life from my other-life, it’s just not possible or smart. Ignoring it doesn’t push it farther away, and running from it just makes it harder to breathe.

As I was writing this, this quote from Tiffany popped up in Twitter.

I learned something on my journey through life. That I was the one preventing myself from moving forward. My past plagued my thoughts 24/7

I’ve been there. Sometimes I’m still there. And this, this isn’t freedom. And neither is the fact that in past years I’ve spent too many minutes fixated on where I thought I was stuck because of the fact that I had a chronic illness, instead of rising above it, kicking my own ass, and trying to work at “changing the standard of thinking“, as Jesse Petersen says.

And what does it come down to? Does it come down sitting in a ball, curled up and preventing yourself from shining . . . or does it come to freeing yourself?

I want to be a part of the picture above.  Freeing myself to do whatever I want in spite of my disease while being responsible about it. This is what it means to live in the moment, and take advantage of the only thing I am immediately in control of: right now. Because asthma, or any other disease, throws in a bunch of variables that are often unpredictable. This week, on Saturday and Sunday I felt perfectly fine, Monday and Tuesday i started going downhill, and Wednesday I couldn’t even breathe well enough to go to work. Tomorrow, or how good I’ll feel tomorrow, is never a guarantee.  For anybody, but it’s amplified if you live with a chronic disease.  I’m not trying to be morbid, just realistic. And I would surely rather be realistic and jumping into the dusky sky than I would either living with regrets of staring at barriers instead of climbing over them or in an emergency room because I’m not taking care of myself.

And that’s a choice. A choice to coexist, but not be limited by my disease.

I would rather make the choice to lift my hands to the sky, jump, shine . . .

And rise above it.