Hallelujah! Today is the first day since my last post that my body has not been wracked with indiscriminate pain. No pity party here, just the facts. For the past 4 or 5 days, I have been engaged in an all too familiar battle–with fibromyalgia and migraines and the unyielding pain that both cause and the price they’ve cost me. This is a post about that struggle.

First came the migraines. They have been with me so long that I can no longer remember exactly when they began. I can’t even remember a time when they were not there-they’ve always been there. (For anyone who hears the word “migraine” and assumes ‘headache,’ please find accurate information for yourself and others at http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/migraine-headache/DS00120 ). The fibromyalgia came much later and for some time was the mystery illness, but it has been the most devastating of the two. If you are unfamiliar with  fibromyalgia, go to the National Fibromyalgia Association,  http://www.fmaware.org/site/PageServer?pagename=fibromyalgia.  I have allowed both to orchestrate and direct my life for far too long.

The duo became my mental, physical and emotional wardens, and I, their unwitting prisoner. They kept me from events, people, hobbies, and later my active attorney status,  making it impossible for me to commit to the very things that make life enjoyable. Nevertheless, for over a year, I’ve wanted to create a blog, both as a means of documenting “me” and my incessant seeking, and a way to write since I can’t actively practice law at this time. Yet, my desire to write goes back much further.

As a little girl, I wrote a little book by hand.  I can’t recall the topic, only the desire to write. Back then, it was no more than the silly dream of a poor, little, girl from a broken home–to escape the world in which I lived. Over the years, I’ve searched in all the wrong places for my authentic voice.You know, that “voice” that in the inimitable words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when trying to define hardcore porno, ” I know it when I see it.” Of course, I am not referring to the perhaps more scintillating topic of pornography, but the more prosaic ‘inner voice’ that elicits a sense of familiarity and home. For some of us, including yours truly, the feeling is significantly more profound. Over the years, especially due to events that I will speak to another time, I’ve out grown the voice that I worn all these decades. It just doesn’t suit me anymore; if it ever did.

It’s like continuing to wear a pair of exquisite, outwardly beautiful and coveted, shoes. They are the perfect style, an impossible to find color, BUT, they are now a half-size too small and they hurt like hell–from the moment I put them on my foot to the glorious moment that I can take them off. Naturally, when I tried them on in the store, they seemed to fit like a dream, but now, they just don’t fit. When you uncover your true voice, a voice that fits you and no other, you know it when you feel it. You slip into it, just like a perfect pair of shoes (hey, I can’t help it if I love shoes). Every fiber in your body awakens and begins to fire on all cylinders and the fit–it’s yours without a doubt. Maybe I’ll find that voice here, maybe I won’t, but I can’t find out unless I try. This time, I am not letting ‘my wardens’ get in my way.

I would be a liar if I claimed to have broken free of my long-time mental prison. No, I am what is known in the correctional institutional parlance, (I know this through my role as a former attorney for the State of Texas, representing state institutions, including its’ many prisons.) as a “trusty,” a well-behaved and trustworthy [prisoner] to whom special privileges are granted. Little by little, I will free myself from this duo, but for now, I am baby-stepping my way back into my life. This blog is one of those baby steps.

Blessings and love,