When your joints freeze because it’s raining and it’s too cold to handle!

The cold gets to you – you like it but your body doesn’t. You want it to be cold outside because you’ve been dying in heat for a long time but your joints feel the chills deep inside. You’ve been dealing with migraines and the cold is sort of soothing, in some ways. But you joints hate it. They ache and hurt and feel heavy. They feel fragile. It’s horrible to have both these experiences simultaneously – on one hand you are sick of the humidity and stickiness and want to wear thinner, lighter clothes and on the other hand your joints need to be taken care of. Maybe you need a thick coat.

Not just that, it’s not so easy or straightforward – just wear more layers and get to work – nope. That’s not how it works. It’s more like this – you wear extra layers and sit in bed. Not even sit, you lie down in bed because your joints are literally cringing away and you can’t do anything. You may even need socks because the old grandma that lives inside of your body (sometimes I wonder if there is an old woman living inside of me. An old soul of some sort) wants her feet massaged and needs her socks on. She needs hot packs too – maybe even four at times.

So you wait in the bed till you feel good enough to get out and begin your day. Or you end up making yet another decision to listen to your body and stay in bed all day – if that’s what grandma wants. You listen to grandma. Because your brain doesn’t know any better at times.

Chronic illness messes with your brain on a daily basis. Chronic illness which causes you debilitating pain every minutes of the day literally screws around with your ability to rest your mind because you are just constantly making decisions. Some of these decisions may sound so freaking trivial to majority of the people but you can’t even imagine what it is like to spend your brain cells over “trivial” matters for your health and your body. Technically, you’d prefer to save these for “more important things in life”.

But even the little things matter so much to us. 

If an average human being makes 4 “trivial” decisions per day and 0-1 bigger ones, we’re easily making about 50 “trivial” ones and 10 bigger ones on a daily basis. I’m not even exaggerating – maybe the ratio is even greater.

Point is,  it is necessary to slow down. Especially because we are making so many decisions all the time. No body needs extra brain cells wasted. No one wants extra pain. You’d say, there are far more important things to worry about  and to that I’d say no. There aren’t. I guess we don’t have the privilege – we really don’t. The most important thing to us ends up being our health. Overall health. We choose to give in to it because if we don’t, we’re asking for more suffering. These “trivial” and “insignificant” issues can cost us our health.

It’s frustrating at times but as you learn to grow (when I say this, I’m referring to the growth you experience as a person, the change you go through as you deal with the illness on a daily basis and the acceptance you start to develop) with your illness, you learn to become patient and treat your body like it needs to be treated. With love and respect, and extra kindness. Even if that means having to sweat in a fur coat to make your joints feel a little better.

Happy Weekend! And yes, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”.

❤︎