How Chronic Illness is teaching me the value of working from the inside out?

Living with a chronic debilitating disease like Multiple Sclerosis tends to lend itself to, what if, kind of thinking. With unknowns around how my body will change due to its progression and nothing to show that one treatment course will work, a lot is trial and error. Some disease-modifying therapies work for some patients while failing others. Diet and exercise are now showing signs of positive impact, yet no diet or form of exercise works for everyone with MS. You decide on a treatment and don’t know for sure it will slow the disease’s progression inside you.

When most people think of MS, they think of a disease that impacts the physical ability, and while that is part, it is far more complex. MS damages the myelin sheath that surrounds the nerves, and when there is enough damage, it will block electrical signals in your brain. Physical abilities are not the only thing impacted. Changes in the brain contribute to pain, fatigue, slow processing, memory issues, mood disorders, and more. In young and early disease, brains compensate with neurological reserve, meaning they can sometimes find ways to work around the damaged nerves. As we age in general, we experience brain atrophy or loss of brain volume, which means if you have MS, your ability to overcome the damage is significantly diminished the older you get.

With natural aging and brain atrophy, most of us lose the ability to filter thoughts as we age. We are more likely to say what we think before we’ve thought about it. We overshare and can no longer hide our real character. This idea is kind of terrifying, knowing that not only will I face changes with normal aging, I will also likely have diminished mental capacity related to MS. Not one to wait until I am already feeling the effects, I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of, What unfiltered reality do I want to come out? What is inside me that flows out most naturally?

While my Multiple Sclerosis inspires my journey of reflection, this is not limited to one disease. Aging is something that will happen to us all; stress is something that happens to us all. And our reality is in times of stress, or as we age, we often see sides of ourselves we’ve never before cared to acknowledge. The world would have us focused on our self-improvement from the outside, how we appear. We can strive to look good and be good, but if we never really take time to process or reflect on our hearts, eventually, what’s inside will come out. Grumpy older people don’t just get old and become grumpy. Inside they’ve been grumpy all along. Likewise, those we admire in their more senior years have spent a lifetime building character.

Born with a unique personality and natural tendencies, we can write a narrative that says, “this is just who I am.” But it doesn’t have to be “just who we are.” We can embrace our natural tendencies while working to be the best version of who we are. While on a walk the other day, my almost eleven year old informed me that he believes he has social anxiety. I asked him why he said that, and he went into depth around specific fears and things he felt were holding him back from putting himself out there and trying new things. While not an official diagnosis, he is a lot like me and does tend to be held back by fear. Fear of saying something wrong, doing the wrong thing, not getting the answer right, etc. Rather than shut down these feelings, we opted to acknowledge that fear is a real issue. Then we moved into asking, what are we going to do about it. How are we going to change the narrative and move the story beyond fear?

We can not will ourselves to be less fearful. We cannot decide to be a better person and just be that person. Doing this in our strength is an impossible, overwhelming, and short-lived experience. We instead need to see this as the equivalent to playing the long game. It’s a journey towards a heart change, working from the inside out. It’s a journey of small intentional steps. It takes intentionally tending our hearts, as my friend Mariel Davenport says, it takes moving towards an end goal of becoming more like our friend Jesus and less like our selfish nature.

It takes asking ourselves questions
and taking time to reflect on the answers.

Who do I want to be?
How do I want people to describe me?
What legacy do I want to leave behind?
What kind of older person do I want to be?

Life can quickly just happen, and we can spend most of our time reacting and surviving. Yet if we step back, pause, and reflect on what matters, we can change our mindset. Rather than responding to what happens, we can be intentional in how we want to live.

This morning while listening to a podcast on Fitness That Heals: Robin Long | Rhythms for Life. Robin was asked what advice she would give someone trying to change their mindset about exercise. Her response was to use a quote she had heard elsewhere saying, “Do the things you need to do, to feel the way you want to feel.” Ask yourself, “How do I want to feel?” Then work backward to do the things you need to do in order to get there. Sometimes we have this fixed mindset about our why or our narrative about who we are. While we want to accept and embrace who we are as individuals, we also don’t need to settle for, “it’s just the way I am.” We get to decide and ask ourselves, “Who do I want to be?” Then work backward and take the baby steps to work towards that goal.