This Too Shall Pass

I’m going to be perfectly honest. This month, the last thirty days of this challenge have done me in mentally, physically and emotionally. Yet, it occurred to me last night that I hadn’t quite made the obvious connection that this “Heal Your Heart” Challenge may far exceed healing my heart from the original perspective of love. Because for the last month, I’ve quite literally been focusing on healing my physical heart. Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia syndrome, that’s what they call it and it’s a diagnosis that is plaguing women at distressingly rising rates. The long and short of it is that the autonomic nervous system doesn’t work the way it should. All the things I took for granted in my physical body like having my blood move to where it was supposed to and having my breathing naturally rise and fall, take a bit more effort these days.

But for me, the most significant thing about P.O.T.S. is how much attention it draws to my heart. Objectively speaking my heart is physically fine. It is the picture of health. But due to dysautonomia, it tends to have moments of confusion and frustration. It beats faster when it theoretically shouldn't. It drops its rate when its meant to be strong and steady. In essence, my heart is now navigating my body with fault signals and that can be incredibly frustrating.

But the funny part about this entire journey with P.O.T.S. and the Heal Your Heart Challenge is that in all the time I was speaking about bringing your heart home to yourself and learning how to show it love, I never considered how critical it was for me to double down on that self-induced mandate. For the better part of this month I have been beating myself up about how my body doesn’t work like it used to. I’ve grown frustrated and sad about all the things that are simply off the table right now due to the way my body works at this moment. It’s easy for me to sink into the headspace that it will always be this way but it won’t. It’s impossible for this to always be the case because I think back to the hundreds of times I thought things would never change. Whether it was the debilitating migraines or the anaphylaxis or the red flashes of heat across my face. Whether it was the unexplainable shaking or the struggling to catch my breath or the dizziness that came after normal movements. All of those things passed with time and this will too.

I’ve been so focused on rushing my heart through the last month in an eagerness to get to the final part of this challenge and it’s because I initially thought that this challenge was about me learning how to love myself in order to be loved by others. Looking back I can see how foolish that is. This challenge is about learning how to love myself full stop. It’s about learning how to love my heart even when it doesn’t do what I ask. It’s about learning how to love my body even when it’s wildly different from what it once was. It’s about learning how to love myself as I am right now because who I am right now is all I am and it’s all I’ve got.

In days 61 through 90 of this challenge I’m releasing control. I don’t have the energy anymore to dictate the outcome of what is about to happen. My heart has proven to me time and time again that no matter how much I prepare, life is full of surprises both good and bad. So I’m done fighting it. I surrender to the fact that I don’t control any outcome in this life and if I cannot control it, I might as well care for myself along the way. Because at the end of the day, the thing I’m most proud of is the person that I’ve become because of how I’ve treated myself and that pride is not something I’m willing to sacrifice because I thought I needed to control everything.