I haven’t been here in a hot minute.  Partly because my life has been very busy with holidays but honestly I don’t feel good and I have terrible fatigue.  I look back at my blogs and I realize I put on a happy face (sometimes too often.)  Maybe too often.  I want to be brave.  I want to face everything with a positive outlook.  I don’t want to be the one who people say “Damn, she complains a lot.”

 

There is a huge history in my family of “categorizing.”  We’ve put each other into stereotypes…I think that is the word I’m looking for.  Categories such as if one is emotional they are called “needy” no matter the circumstance.  There is “the fat one” and they are the one everyone compares against.  The biggest one is the “hypochondriac”.  That’s a big one in my family.  Placing a person in a category is dangerous and it becomes even more so when it’s done by people who you are supposed to trust.  The danger in growing up with a hypochondriac category in your family is that an illness is always put in doubt.  My family has a history of very serious physical illnesses; the type of illness that should be taken seriously.  However, if you have multiple illnesses followed by complaining about another symptom you were placed in a category. You were “a hypochondriac”.  The typecasting that “you are just looking for attention” became a standard statement when someone complained of illness while I was growing up.

 

I just happen to have been the “needy” one and the “fat one”.  Those are dangerous typecasts but as you grow in life you learn that the position you were placed in as a child is not who you are as an adult.  The one I began to fear was being placed into the dreaded “hypochondriac” category. That category was seen as a vulgar mental illness and having it pinned to your jacket meant that it could ever be removed.  No. Matter. What.  I look now and realized that I watched it happen to one of my family members who in the end had an absolute problem and it kept them from being diagnosed properly.

 

I have lived in constant fear of being placed in that category all of my life.  The horrible condescending feeling that was dispersed upon that person actually made me fear belittlement and shame.  

 

I have an actual physical illness.  I have a very serious illness with incredible side effects. There are people who have it much worse than me, I know that.  Because of the fear of being in placed in the hypochondriac category though,  I hide as absolutely much as possible.  I suffer in silence.  I don’t let people in my life know just how serious it is.  I’m ashamed of looking weak, or making more of my illness than those who may be more ill than me.  I do this to my own detriment.  I do this to the point that with every doctors appointment I am “sure” in my mind they will find nothing wrong.  Whether I want to say it out loud or not, I am not well and they do keep finding things wrong.

 

Today I am going to complain. Tomorrow I am headed to Mayo Clinic in Rochester.  I want this so bad.  I want to be fixed.  I don’t want to live with this illness any longer. 

 

Today I am going to admit I’m not brave.