I’d like to provide some words of encouragement to those of you
struggling on your journey to better health. You may have seen my post the
other day celebrating my anniversary of starting the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP). I also shared it in
a facebook group and a member there sent me a quote from Faust by Goethe as a
reminder to place trust in one’s instincts and to follow a dream.
“What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
I had once put all my trust in the doctors, the meds, the
psych wards, even religion, but they all proved to be empty promises. To take
another great quote from Goethe: "The way you see people is the way you
treat them. And the way you treat them is what they become." Such is
psychiatry. When you are in the darkest of places, when fear and despair are
the only things you feel, the only outlet pain, despair or even death, you are told
to trust. So, you put your trust in medicine, in the white coats and
stethoscopes, but trusting in a recovery is never a realistic expectation,
especially an affected mind like mine. But when a chink in the impenetrable
armour of my brain illness appeared, in the form of a dietary link to my other
autoimmune diseases, it was hope I felt first, not trust. But the glimmer of
light that was hope grew stronger and brighter every day as I researched,
understood and healed from this illness.
The challenge for all of us on this path is realising that
you can dare to dream. This is what is so sad, because what happened to me
damaged the one thing I need to dream - my mind. All those around me insisted
that pills to further close my mind and shutting me away were the kindest thing
they could do. I needed the opposite, it was the boldness I showed, the
commitment, the ‘power and magic’, that made me throw out my pills and free my
broken mind!
And then I dreamed, and what a dream it was. Hope followed,
then I trusted, then I believed, then I knew. And here I am.
I am still recovering, even after all this time, and I am working
very hard at trying to repair my marriage and relationships that were so badly
hurt by this illness. Reading the above quote promoted me to go and find my
copy of Faust just now; I must not have opened it in over five years. Inside
was a rose I gave to my wife many years ago, lost in the chaos of my illness and
the memory lost to the amnesia that has so overwhelmed me, but it evoked a
distant glimmer of a memory, a feeling, of a happier time. I will show it to my
wife tomorrow; perhaps it will serve another reminder of the strength on which
our beleaguered marriage was once built. Perhaps it will strengthen the dream, and
hope will follow.
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