Why You Need To Turn the Page

As you may have already picked up, I come on here to talk about the struggles of living with SMA. But as I work through these moments with you by channeling my feelings through writing, I find solutions. 

I find solutions to the problems in my life, the strength in my struggles, and I share it with you. I share it in hopes of my own experiences resonating with someone else. I share it in hopes that maybe, just maybe, someone is out there needing to read these words that I have written. Even if that someone is only my mother (love ya, mom!), I feel like my job is done. 

However, 2017 was a year full of struggles and many little solutions. I touched upon this in the last post before I ghosted you for 13 months (forgive me?), but it only scratched at the surface of the things I wasn’t ready to face. 

By not having solutions, I wasn’t able to make sense of what was happening. 

And that crushed me. I begged with God, spent countless hours in doctors’ offices, and was exposed to one too many CT scan machines just to have been given the run-around for several months. Even though my body was demonstrating symptoms of vertigo, respiratory distress, sensitivity to heat, pre-syncope, and more, I kept coming back with a clean bill of health. 

So I took to this little ole blog. And I wrote about a conversation I had with a good friend who said I just needed to trust the process. Those words hit me so hard. 

Trust the process.

Something so simple had touched me so poignantly, and so I decided to give you a glimpse at all the things I was experiencing and discuss how I interpreted her words. And while I believed in every word I wrote, the truth was I didn’t act upon it. In a way, I felt like I had failed you. How could I hop on my blog and encourage others to live their best lives in spite of pain while I was shattered and unwilling to glue my pieces back together?

So for a couple of weeks following that post, I put my energy elsewhere. I launched an online shop for my nonprofit organization and participated in the most basic white girl fall activities October could offer in spite of those symptoms that lingered to remind me I was still trudging through the mud. Coincidentally, about 3 weeks later, I got sick. 

Again.

Except… I wasn’t the traditional kind of sick- fevers, runny nose, cough, etc- that you would normally classify as not feeling well for ten days or so. A trip to the ER in the middle of the night determined I had a touch of atelectasis (small pockets of fluid in my lungs) and an elevated white blood cell count. The severe tightness in my chest and overall feelings of uneasiness were just enough to shove me off the edge of a mountain I worked so hard to climb and into a valley. 

What happened in the weeks that followed was something I thought I’d never share. 

It was the darkest period of my life, one I truly thought I’d never overcome. Physically, my body was spent. I could no longer breathe well while sitting up, the steroids prescribed were making me feel increasingly weak, and my energy was shot. Emotionally, I was bruised and battered. I was simply a shell of the girl that used to be. 

I didn’t realize this back then, but the valley I was in was disguised as an opportunity to start over. I think sometimes the only way to get to the person you’re supposed to become is by losing who you are. It’s by being stripped away of the person you’ve worked so hard at molding and sculpting and learning how it feels to be a stranger in your own body. It’s by choosing to accept the fact that sometimes pieces aren’t meant to be glued back together so that you have a chance to start with a clean slate. 

This valley was my clean slate, my starting line. 

It was a chapter of my life writing its concluding sentence and preparing for the blank page ahead. However, I didn’t see it that way and, truthfully, I don’t blame myself. When the season you’re in casts a shadow over your light, it’s easy for your vision to become distorted. And the more you can’t see, the harder it is to read between the lines. 

A year ago, I was floundering in a state of confusion and hopelessness. I was truly lost and blinded by darkness. And instead of turning the page to the next chapter, I ruminated in the last sentence. I held on to the life I knew and pushed others out because the old Alyssa was a distant memory, and I feared the person I thought I was becoming. 

I’m finding it difficult to write these words because I’ve come so far since those days. But, lately, my mind keeps wandering back to this point in my life. Perhaps it’s because it was exactly one year ago when I felt like my life came to a screeching halt. It was one year ago that I was begging my mother to exclude me from the Thanksgiving festivities because I couldn’t bear one more concerned face from loved ones. It was one year ago that I thought I’d never speak of the darkness I was in because I was truly ashamed of the person I’d become. 

But here I am, typing each word with as much as intention as the last. Because as challenging as it is for me to relive and rehash this period of my life, I’m now understanding how necessary it is to share these moments with you as we embark on this season of gratitude. At this time last year, I found very little to be grateful for, and when you’ve been in that place, you learn to understand how hard this season may be for others as well. But if you find yourself stuck in the previous chapter of your life like I did, let me tell you a little something that happens when you finally turn the page.

Eventually, the moment will come when you’re ready for a fresh beginning. And I want to put a big emphasis on the “eventually” because it isn’t going to happen overnight. It isn’t going to be found in self-help books or the same three Netflix shows you’ve been binge-watching during this offseason. It’s going to be slow, and it’s going to feel a lot like waiting and less like doing. But, eventually, you will reach for that page and flip it. 

And in that moment, that moment where you’re staring at a blank page before you, you’ll realize the concluding sentence you clung so tightly to was actually a cliffhanger leading to a beautiful chapter ahead. 

I ended up going to our family’s Thanksgiving dinner last year, and I thanked my mother for pushing me to go for it was exactly what my heart needed. Today, I look back and realize, without even trying, that was the day I decided to turn the page. My health had been a long uphill battle, but for a few hours, I decided to relish in the valley for it was filled with my crazy Portuguese family, and that was more than enough to shake some sense into me. I was simply grateful. For every little thing. Somehow that made all the difference to instill the idea in me that a grateful heart is a happy heart. And from that point forward, that was the narrative I chose to live by as I learned to begin again in spite of whatever burdensome feat was to come my way. 

I hope wherever your heart is this holiday season, you always find a reason to be thankful. I get it- this can be a challenging time of year. But I hope you find strength and courage and the littlest joys in those insignificant details of your everyday moments. I hope no matter how tough the going gets, you get tougher. 

And, above all else, I hope you remember to turn the page.