Taking My Life Back: One Day at a Time

Living with psoriatic arthritis can be all consuming. Keeping up with the doctor appointments, treatment plans, and symptom tracking is easily a full time job. I forget that I had a life before psoriatic arthritis. What did I do with all the time that wasn’t consumed with managing my disease? What kind of person was I when I wasn’t defined by my PsA?

Some days those questions are so hard. I can’t even remember the answers because I get consumed searching for answers to other, more pressing questions like, “What does my future hold, a wheelchair? Will I ever feel better? What if I never find a medication that works? What if my children begin to develop symptoms? Where has my life gone?

It is so easy to fall down a rabbit hole

I fell down this rabbit hole of questions myself and let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. I began to lose touch with the fact that I was a person, not just a chronic illness. There is more to me than my psoriatic arthritis diagnosis and no matter how much I want the answers to some questions, they just aren’t worth losing myself in the process of discovering them. I spent countless hours tracking down answers and options to manage my chronic pain, instead of doing the things that make me, me.

Find the balance

You see, I let myself become overwhelmed with the disease, instead of learning to balance MY life with my psoriatic arthritis diagnosis. Instead of simply accepting my diagnosis as only ONE part of me, there are many days when I feel I allowed it to become ALL of me. I defined myself by my PsA instead of the other way around. I am who I am, and just one part of me is a person with psoriatic arthritis. I made too much room in my life for the disease, and not enough room to just be me.

Take your life back

So, starting today, right now, right at this moment, I’m taking my life back. I’m going to focus on all those other parts of my life that have been neglected while I learned to manage my disease. I’m going to replenish my spirit, feed my soul, and learn how to be me again. But a stronger, more focused, more appreciative me. I will go back to those neglected parts of myself and tend to them. Tend to the creative parts. Tend to the painful parts. Tend to me.

How can I take my life back?

Amid all the things that I must do to simply get through my day, where will I find the energy to manage all the neglected parts of me? Well, like my Mom used to always say when my room was such a mess you could barely open the door, “You gotta start somewhere.” So today, just today, I will do one thing that is part of the “old” me. It’s not perfect, but I’m starting somewhere. Each day, I will focus on doing one thing, one day. So that I can take back my life from psoriatic arthritis, one day at a time.