I’m sure that many people would agree that January is probably one of the worst times of year. Once the relief that the busy Christmas period is over, and once the New Year resolutions start to get boring, a lot of us end up with a month that is filled with us pushing un-achievable goals, making us miserable. Yet, even though we know this will happen to us year after year, we still feel the pressure to push ourselves to the brink again. Everyone around us won’t stop talking about it, so we also feel the need to have a fitness goal, a dry January, an intense work month, or a new clean diet. Everywhere we look, whether on social media or advertised on the street, this idea of how January needs to be a time of change and health is pushed onto us.
However, despite this being the same each year, I would say this January I have felt all the above pressures a lot more. Most people are privileged enough to have the option (whether they will stick to it or not) of looking around on the 1st of January and committing to changes to their life that will improve their health. This year, I was heartbroken to not have this privilege.
My hospital consultation this month confirmed that there are no medications out there able to stabilise my condition, and blood tests reiterated that the progress I had made in bringing down the symptoms had been reversed. Returning officially to the workplace is something I have been desperate for, but I now have to tread carefully to find a routine that won’t worsen my condition any further. It has shown that perhaps getting back into an exercise routine recently could have done more harm than good. Trying to stay mildly active or be in severe pain is a tossup I have to make most mornings. It has meant that any standard ‘New Tears resolutions’ I had hoped for are firmly out of the window, essentially.
When you have a flare up with lupus, which is what those of us with chronic conditions use to describe a sudden spike in symptoms of the condition, exercising is one of the last things you can even think of doing. Most days I have some sort of pain, so when I flare, it means I have pain throughout my body. It also greatly worsens my fatigue and brain fog, so any plans of being mentally productive vanish as well. Even getting out of bed to do basic tasks is often unmanageable. Yet, there is then this counterintuitive rhetoric in January that I cannot escape, telling me that now is the time to run my life around, become super active, and pursue my goals. It’s so hard to avoid the videos popping up on my social feed of fitness instructors saying things like ‘This is so easy to do, you have no excuse!’
I am well aware, deep down, that behaving in this way is far from lazy, and an unavoidable response to an illness that I have no control over at this stage in my life. If I spoke to someone going through something similar and heard them describe themself as lazy, I would be outraged and explain how wrong they were. I would explain that January is just another month, and that we can’t suit our bodies to a calendar. I would explain how resting when they experience things like this is actually beneficial and productive, that rest is sometimes the only thing we can do to improve our symptoms and reduce inflammation. I would explain that exercise is only beneficial if it does good things to our body, rather than create pain. Finally, I would explain that our health is invaluable, and we shouldn’t sacrifice it to fit into someone’s version of what January should be.
As someone with an invisible disability who only got diagnosed in the last 5 years, I am still learning every day about the language and attitudes within our society that are ableist and am lucky enough these aren’t always apparent to me. January has felt like a struggle for me, mainly because of my own issues with the grieving process of my healthy body from my younger years, but also from the pressures that society has placed on me. I am far from where I would like to be in terms of ignoring these pressures and speaking to myself in the compassionate voice I wrote above, but writing this blog and reflecting on the month has been a great start. I hope this can allow me to have a more positive February, prioritising my own body as it is rather than by anyone else’s standards.
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