First of all, which of you know the red and blue letter envelope? Ok, I will tell you a story. I kept my disease a secret for almost 8 years; I used to say, ‘I can’t hear anyone’s suggestions.’ But when I recently decided to talk about it after one of the bad relapses I had experienced. I found myself using the vocabulary known in the context of the disease. I even made the hashtag #Fight Sclerosis in the first post on my account.
In fact, I was not aware of how such vocabulary ccould form my convictions, nor how it changed my perception of the disease. I began reviewing my inner dialogue and the words I use to describe myself and other sufferers when I found an inspiring text written by Andreas Mortes on Cancer that said, ‘You should not enter a battle with cancer, you must be cured of it.’ I wondered.. What does this mean to me? If I fight Multiple Sclerosis, Who am I fighting? There are no extraneous microbes or bodies that I want to get rid of, so who will I fight?
This text came to add to the convictions that were being created within me. I have been and still imagining Multiple Sclerosis as a postman, I imagine him as a skinny person at the end of the fifties wearing a pale-colored suit, looking a little tired but smiling despite the heat. He is now (one o’clock in the afternoon) at my doorstep to deliver me a letter, I say hello, take the letter and thank him, according to the norms, and each goes his way. Regardless of the content of the letter, the postman is neither my enemy nor my friend, I do not need to get into a fight with him nor invite him to my house, he just had to deliver something for me.
I open the letter and see that it is addressed to me from Multiple Sclerosis that lives in my body. And I already know that it will be a hard-boring message, it says “Hi, how are you? I will go directly into the topic, you are in your early thirties and have not yet learned how to chew food, that is if what you eat is called food! The years of your youth passed and you did not know your body mood, plus you ate incompatible foods, you made bad decisions regarding your food, exposing you to pollutants and other harmful things.” The message then talks about the excessive anxiety and the depression that I have not resolved yet. Then she adds sarcastically that the concept of trust in God would have helped you if you used it properly, but you are now in the middle of dozens of bad decisions that affected your body. The message was not very nice, scolds me a little. Although they told me that there is no cure for the disease, I kept knocking on the same door for years and years, forgetting that I could obtain the support available in modern medicine as well as other branches of medicine.
And because I was surprised by the tone of the letter, which was a mixture of sarcasm and rebuking, I felt an urgent desire to call the postman to yell at him, and this is exactly what I did. I was a bit narrow-minded then, I blamed the bearer of the letter for its content.
All diseases carry messages, some carry clear messages and others carry puzzling messages that require some time to decode. These messages are very personal, but I will share with you some points directed at me:
The first message the disease told me was a reminder of the Quran verse {Let people then consider their food}, and it emphasized the need to amend my relationship with God, myself, and others. Modifying relationships does not mean eliminating negative and provocative people from our life because the world does not go this way, but rather investing time and effort in relationships. (It is true that sometimes the first thing that comes to my mind when I see someone’s face is the phrase ‘God help me’, but I am still working on this.
True, we feel tired, upset, angry, sad, happy, egative, anxious, positive, and a lot of emotions, but the postman is not concerned with it. In fact, we seem to be the ones clinging to him. There are dialogues that we must carry out with ourselves, the most important of which is how much responsibility we bear in the curing process, and how much of it we burden the pharmacist with. Do we see the cure as a shared responsibility? What should I do besides taking medications?
Diseases, especially chronic ones, do not go away before we deal with all the points mentioned in the message that comes with them, and if we need years to understand and apply those points, the disease will remain with us for years.
Multiple Sclerosis should go, but not through wars and fights, but through listening and then going through the healing process. What are the multiple sclerosis messages to you ?