Ever since I could remember my body and I have had a love/hate relationship. When I was younger I did want to be “skinnier” but mostly, I was concerned with being stronger in muscles and faster in running. I liked the feeling of accomplishment in knowing I was able to lift something heavy without help or look back on a long run I was able to do without stopping.

That mentality stayed with me after I was diagnosed with Lupus in 2002. I didn’t know what it really meant to be diagnosed with something like that. I remembered my mother being diagnosed with Lupus when I was young. (No, it is not hereditary) All I remember is she had some bald patches. She still worked a full time job and mostly raised us. I say mostly because she was a huge alcoholic when I was growing up. There would be days and weeks I had no idea where she was at.

In my early years of Lupus I did not take care of myself. I would constantly forget to take meds, push myself physically and took on more responsibility than I really should have. There were times I would be so busy just trying to “live my life”, raising my child, trying to be the perfect wife and I would totally forget about appointments or lab work. I didn’t realize at the time that I was pushing my “life” my “reality” away and just wishing to be “normal”.

There is nothing normal about a chronic illness. Your body is always playing an inside joke on you. You look healthy on the outside but on the inside it’s chaos. This was something I never took a hard look at and eventually it caught up.

My Lupus comes and goes in “flares” and that’s when my kidneys get attacked by my own body. Lupus makes your immune system think your body is the enemy so it goes in over drive. I had a very bad flare in 2009 and doctors tried to stop my immune system from beating up my kidneys with a small round of chemotherapy. This is common with Lupus when there is no other alternative.

It was just once a month for 6 months but in my mid 30’s I had to face the fact that after doing this I would most likely not be able to have another child. My hair thinned and fell out, my face became swollen (typical moon face) because I also had to go on prednisone and I just kept pushing through. I was “volunteering” almost every day of the week for my church, helping my daughter with 4H and also homeschooling her. My husband was also deployed to Iraq at this time. There was no time to stop and take care of my mental health. I didn’t even realize the spiral I was crating for myself because I just kept so busy.

I eventually went into perimenopause in my late 30’s/early 40’s. I didn’t realize it until I was at one of my Lupus checkups and chatting with my doctor about my irregular menstrual cycles. When they mentioned the chemo might have kicked in menopause early it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was not mentally ready to let go of never having any more children. Not that I should have even had anymore with all the health issues I was dealing with. But, that just shows how out of touch I was with my mental health.

Eventually, there were aspects of menopause I really liked. No menstrual cycle anymore was so freeing. The “spare tire” around my midsection, however, was a rude awakening. I eventually thought this menopause thing that people made rude jokes about was actually no big deal. I even decided to go on a very low calorie diet and lost a lot of weight that I had gained. I was feeling great about my body. Then, I had another flare.

Yeah, prednisone again (moon face) but thankfully no chemo. But, the weight piled back on. Again, I had not faced up to the mental weight of dealing with a chronic illness. Prednisone makes you hungry and very irritable. I packed on about half the weight I lost and I could not budge the scale at all.

After about 10 years of menopause I started to have really bad hot flashes, night sweats, very poor sleep and it felt as if I was on prednisone 24/7 even after my flare was done and gone. I decided to see my primary care doctor and thankfully she listened.

Dealing with 20 plus years of my body betraying me had built up so much stress. On a day to day basis I don’t really think about it but it’s always there. There’s a “happy medium” I can maintain but when my body decided to add new menopause symptoms I began spiraling thinking: “how long is this going to last?”, “is this my new normal?”, “can I ever be my happy self?”, “why am I so mad all the time?”, “why do I get so upset?”.

It was the final straw. The straw that broke the camel’s back of dealing with chronic illness for half my life and not giving myself grace. Even as I stepped on the mat to teach yoga to students I would tell them “be kind to yourself” and yet I was the one who needed to listen to those words the most.

Using yoga to peel back all of these expectations I was putting on myself has been helpful. I didn’t need to change, I just had to see the beautiful person I was. This is not easy to do when you are a woman in an American society. Not only are able bodied people put up as the “ideal” but youth is worshiped to the extreme.

Being able to take a step back and see what expectations & impossible ideals I was putting on myself has been a shift I needed. I will never be “healthy”, I will never be “young” again, and I will never be “thin”. Why am I trying to force those upon myself? I don’t know, really. It’s a question I have to ask myself everyday. Accepting myself as I am right here and now is a learning process I experience every single day. Some days I am so confident in my body just the way it is and other days not so much.

That’s the beauty of being a student of yoga. Always learning that everything you need to be who you are is already inside yourself. It’s stepping out of those thoughts that take you away from yourself and seeing you were always exactly who you needed to be already.