“You’re faking it…”*

Thursday was amazing – from morning ’til night I stayed busy with stuff people all over the civilized world do every day and never think twice about. Rolled out of bed at 8:00, had some coffee, got dressed, slapped a cap on my wild head, and strolled over to the barbershop, a distance of half a block plus an alley. After all that dedication on my part, my girl Shelby wasn’t in yet, so I turned myself right around and trekked back home.

Took a shower and spent the morning writing at my computer. After Kim got home from PickleBall we had lunch at Five Guys, went to Target where only he went in, stopped at the dry cleaners, Kim again, and he dropped me off for my haircut, after which I walked the block and an alley home again. Played on my computer a while, did a load of laundry, policed some clutter. Around 3:00 we went south again to Cielito Lindo, which sits that one alley I mentioned short of the barbershop, for Margaritas, chips & salsa, and forbidden queso. We were home and entertaining each other on our own balcony by 5:00, and asleep early, as in by 9:30pm.

That was a big ol’ mess of trivia and why in the everloving did I bother sharing it, you ask? Only because, since no good deed (or day) goes unpunished I woke up at 3am in full-on fibro meltdown. To expound on the symptoms would turn this into a whine, just know that I paid big for the best day I’ve had in quite a while, and that this is the sort of price extracted from anyone out there with an autoimmune disfunction who’s bold enough to enjoy what’s in front of them once in a while. You can say I overdid it, but if you read back through and pick out the action words you can see that it was well-paced and carefully done and didn’t amount to all that much. At no time did pain tell me to sit down and shut up, so I rambled around in the sunshine behaving like a real person just for shits & giggles. The 3am message was “Hey, girl,” sounding nothing at all like Ryan Gosling, “you thought that regular stuff was for you. Haha, so sorry.”

The good news, because who can’t always use some, is that Friday was the only lost day this time, down from an average three. Tells me we’re on the right track with Ken & The Lymph Nodes, and that makes me happy.

The reason I’m taking the time to blog about this is that the thinly-veiled scorn that ends up out there on the backs of people who can scarcely spare the energy to deal with it is grating and I hurt on their behalf. Whatever people might say about me is none of my business, but ignorant digs at friends and family don’t go unnoticed, so I choose to fly my educator flag occasionally.

It’s all so simple – if you haven’t experienced or been diagnosed with an illness that for some reason annoys you in others then you don’t have a platform, so this is not your circus, it’s okay to wander off and take care a’ bidness, maybe contribute to the greater good through kindness or tolerance, something like that. Fibromyalgia is an invisible disease that affects 100% of the body, so you can feel really good about cutting people slack, in fact that’s your mission today should you choose to accept it.

*Don’t read past this point unless you’re in the mood for naked truth…

#saturdaymorning #notwhining #Fibromyalgia