Empowerment is vitally important to your mental and physical well being .
Adapting to the many daunting changes and challenges ahead can be difficult for EM'er's - often leading to a sense of hopelessness. Whatever your coping strategy , the aim is to re-discover the motivation and fuel necessary to help you get through one of the most difficult period of your life.
What things are you doing to empower yourself?
Have you any self-empowerment tools to share with fellow community members?
I am not sure where this comes from but I know it has been an actual effort . I just try and remember whatever is happening to me doesn't change by getting upset or down about it in fact it can often make things worse. I make the effort to be more positive and to not dwell on what I can't do but look forward and discover what I can do and of these what brings me joy? When those times happen when I just can't hold it together I allow myself without guilt a day of woe is me and true grieving. After one day I NO MATTER WHAT make the decision again to be happy , press on and busy myself with what I can do that makes me happy. I never let this go more than a day at a time or it is more likely to become a habit as any repeated behavior is and the harder to climb back out of.
My being here and sharing here is one of my empowering tools. it gives me purpose to help others and I am always moved to keep going by the words from my new friends here.
Thank you all for helping me get through every day.
I know I am lucky that I have never been really depressed, perhaps when I was a teenager but that was a long long time ago. So many bad things have happened to me that my attitude has always been that nothing could be as bad as harm to ones family and if I got this far I surely have the strength to cope. I often feel sad. I have cried a river many a time in my life but never drowned in it and always managed to clamber out and told myself to quit the crying as it makes my eyes hurt and my nose run.
My coping strategy is to keep very busy. I leave jobs out which I can do when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night. I have standing jobs which have to be done and a pile of mending, crosswords and toy fixing etc. which can be done sitting down as I can neither stand nor sit for too long. I do the jobs I enjoy most to the detriment of house cleaning; better to be happily busy in a slightly* dusty house than overworking myself with the vacuum cleaner. I believe in the maxim, if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen, or at least away from the stove and I cook as little as possible. In Summer hardly ever.
I believe going swimming helps me enormously and again I know how fortunate I am to live within a five minute drive of a lovely cool pool. Oh and the driving which is my greatest blessing, air con. pointing at my feet, giving me the ability to visit with my grandchildren. I don’t feel the pain in my feet when I am laughing at the comedy produced by little children. I push myself beyond the limit much of the time and then have some days when I can’t rouse myself to do the necessary, but it’s a physical impossibility, the spirit is still willing!
I spend time too finding ways to keep cool, ever more ingenious/ridiculous. I see EM as a tyrant I have to defeat, or at least keep at bay.
And as Alina says, what (little) I do for Ben’s Friends helps too. I have ‘met’ some wonderful people and marvelled how they keep fighting terrible pain or complete lack of freedom and I am more than grateful for my new friends and my old friends and relations who rallied round when I ended up in hospital.
That was an interesting half an hour writing and my conclusion is that I am very, very lucky:)
*well ‘slightly’ unless I put my glasses on.