What if you had the choice to choose to look above the things that are around you? I’m not just talking about pretending things aren’t happening or turning a blind eye. There’s a strength in acknowledging that there is pain but choosing to be happy, there is stress but choosing peace. In this story we see a young woman overcome the destress of a pending diagnosis and how she finds hope in the middle of a hopeless circumstance.

I woke up, groggy and disorientated. My alarm was going off like a siren ringing in my ears. I tried to move my arm to switch off the alarm but it felt dead - as if there was no way it was going to do what I wanted it to do. So I flung my body over to get my arm to a place where it could stop the alarm. The alarm was growing louder and louder and in the process of flinging my arm, absolutely everything on my bedside table flew into the abiss - what on earth was going on with my arm, why couldn’t I control it, why did it feel numb? Naturally I just assumed that I slept on it funny and tried to carry on with my day as if there was nothing wrong.

A few nights later I was getting ready for bed and noticed my arm feel completely dead, again. Asking myself all the same questions, with the added one of, Why can’t I raise my arm? I shook it off again and thought it was in my head. As the days and weeks progressed the pins and needles started to become an all day experience. I lost the ability to control my hand the way I was once able to and I had pins and needles in my left foot and leg. I knew I had to go get it looked at. I went to the doctor, thinking that it might have been because of my new fitbit but I left feeling scared of what might have been coming my way.

MRI, Neurology Appointment, Full Blood Tests all ordered. So much for thinking that this was just because of sleeping weirdly on it. The panic and fear had fully set in with my mind in complete over drive trying to figure out what was going on with me - was it multiple Sclerosis? Fibromyalgia? ME? Lupus? I really had no idea other than it was something to do with my nerves - that’s all the doctors had told me, with the added note that, ‘it’s looking a lot like MS.’

By this point walking had become painful and there was a constant deep ache within my bones, my memory was impaired, sentences were at times a struggle to string together, and pure exhaustion had become my reality.

Earlier that year, in 2020, I had gotten engaged to the love of my life, who is now my husband of almost 2 years. The trivial yet incredibly important realisation came to me, that not only would Covid potentially stop me from walking down the aisle but my actual body itself might not allow me to do this. It was insane to even think that this was my reality. I had watched shows about people going for MRIs, never ever thinking that that would be something that I would experience, and yet here I was stood in this place where my reality was so far from my imagination that I could not wrap my head around any of it. I couldn’t figure out what it was. The neurologists had nothing they could do to help me or diagnose me with. I couldn’t deal with the pain. I couldn’t concentrate. I felt like my life was spiralling, and I in turn spiralled with it. I’d almost completely lost myself in the fear of what this thing was, the fear of how I was going to wake up each and every day, realising that I could not at all rely on myself, I couldn’t rely on the very thing that’s meant to keep me alive. My brain.

The complete loss of self in the midst of circumstance. This thing had so much power over how I lived. In that moment it was like I was being navigated by this thing that had no name, this thing that affected and infected my daily life.

Now let’s be honest this wasn’t my first rodeo - like I’ve been there, I’ve been through tough times, I’ve been through times where I’ve not known how I was going to survive. You would’ve thought that by this time, by this moment, by this challenge, I would’ve started everything from a stance of knowing that this wasn’t going to win, this wasn’t going to be who I was or how I was going to carry myself; But as you’ve already read that wasn’t the case. You know sometimes you go through things in life and you wonder why you went through them. Why did this have to happen to me? Why is everything against me? - these are all real questions, but the truth is every single thing we go through in life teaches us something that we didn’t realise before, and if we don’t learn in the other circumstances, we will definitely learn in the next circumstance.

For me not having a diagnosis but still having the pain and the reality of what that pain brought into my life, made me have to learn how to not be dictated to by the circumstance. It would’ve been so much easier if I was able to say to my employer that I have multiple sclerosis and that’s why I am in this pain. Instead I had to justify the reason why I need time or the reason why I couldn’t walk properly, the reason why my hands weren’t functioning, I had to justify it without any medical definition but the truth of the matter is the diagnosis was not going to ever change the reality. The reality was going to be the same. Sure it may have given me some options and maybe some more medication to try, but it wasn’t going to change the circuimstance. The reality was that my body was not doing what it was meant to. Period. I had to change the way I let it dictate my life. I had to teach myself that it didn’t have to be all I thought about. After all life is so much more than the things that happen to us. There are things that cause disruption and situations that cause a default in our hearts to panic but will we let the circumstance control us?

We seem to give the power and the free will that we have so freely to the thing in front of us, that we risk making it our god. We think that the things that happen to us will control everything that we do and how we go about our lives, but actually the power lies within our minds. With our choices. In the middle of all the fear and torment I realised that I had a choice. My choice was, I either sit there and weep in the pain that I felt, or I learn ways to cope, ways to choose joy. I had to learn ways to feel the pain but not let it change the way I carried myself in a room, not let it change my ability to do tasks- Just because I was doing things differently did not mean that I had to stop doing them.

No way, this was never going to be the thing that made me who I was. I had overcome too much. I had come too far to let the circumstance drown me. I had to make the choice to look above what was in front of me. I had to choose to believe that this was not all that I was- it wasn’t my definition. I had to choose hope. Fixing my gaze above the thing that is in front of me, above the storm, above the valley, above even the mountain tops.

The circumstances that we find ourselves in is not the dictator of who we are or how we do things. It is actually the thing that pushes us to become greater, to live in victory. If we allow the situation to define us, we let it defeat us. This painting became a part of a story about fixing your eyes above what is in front of you, above your reality and reminding yourself that the life that you live is only dictated by the choices you make and the thing you choose to fix your eyes on. If you only see the circumstance in front of you, you will miss out on everything else that is a part of your life; Just like if I let a disability be the thing that defines who I am, then I lose out on every other characteristic that makes my life beautiful. Why miss out on all the goodness when all you have to do is see the full picture of the life in front of you.