Four Hours

Four hours each week I leave the house to go to my internship. I am completing my doctorate in psychology and I still have a few internship hours to finish. I should be done by now. I should have finished in August. It is now February. CFS reared its ugly head last March and by June I was unable to get out of the house anymore so I had to put everything on hold. I went back to my internship in October but only four hours a week. Some weeks I can't even manage four hours.

Four hours. It seems like such a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things but those four hours are a precious gift to me. They exhaust me, but they also exhilarate me. Those hours make up the sum total of the time I feel connected to the world each week. They give me purpose and hope. They make me feel like my dreams might still come true. They make me feel smart and useful. They set my mind on fire again and they make me remember why I chose to go into psychology. Those four hours each week are the only hours I am with people other than my family or someone in the medical field. My world has gotten increasingly smaller since my illness and those four hours allow my world to get a little bit larger; if only for a little while.

Those hours also make me feel sad, frustrated, angry, and very scared. They remind me of who I was before the illness and how much my life has changed. They remind me of how much I have lost. They remind me of how uncertain my future is. Is this my life? Is this what I have to look forward to? Will things ever change? Will I be able to have a career? Will I be able to be an effective wife and a mother? Will I be able to travel the world as I had hoped, go camping, take my family canoeing, and go hiking in the mountains? Will I run or even walk around the block again? I don't have the answers to these questions. No one does. No one can tell me if I will ever recover from this illness or what my life will look like in the future.

We all live with uncertainty. That is part of the human condition. No one has a crystal ball. Even if I was perfectly healthy there would be no guarantees that I would achieve my dreams. We all have to make the best of what we have at any given moment in time. And that is all this is. A moment. It may feel like a lifetime, but it isn't. It is just now. I don't know what the next moment will bring.

I have to continue living and trying my best despite this illness. I can't just sit here and wait. I have to continue to do what I can. I can't let this be the end of my world. I can't let this illness win. I won't lay in bed and think about all that isn't. I will think about all that is. I will feel sad, I will cry, and maybe I will even languish in my grief sometimes. I will also struggle, get angry, and feel betrayed and lost. Sometimes I may even have a hard time seeing the silver lining. But those are just moments too. They will pass. I will continue to hope and dream and do everything in my power to beat this illness. And each and every week I will continue to enjoy the precious gift of those four hours.