Slow & steady
Image description: Kae is in her living room, in child’s pose with her eyes closed, hugging and resting her head sideways on a yoga wheel.
Image description: a photo of a snail in nature sitting on top of a wild mushroom, while eating a blueberry taken from a nearby blueberry bush. Source: Google images.
Image description: Kae is in her living room, in child’s pose, hugging and resting her head sideways on a yoga wheel while looking into the camera.
#MuscularDystrophy is a disease that continually tests every fibre of my being. It’s progressive and debilitating; it’s unpredictable and off-putting; it backs me into a corner and makes me confront my mortality every single day. I could choose to lie down, and it’d be understandable but I’m choosing life instead—and it’s a lot of hard work.
Towards the end of undergrad, I had an epiphany. I experienced a deep shift that forever changed the course of my life. I decided life was worth living and fighting for and immediately started making radical changes to my lifestyle. I sacrificed a lot, including a version of myself. I ingrained in me that I had no other choice but to dedicate myself fully to the pursuit of the life I dreamed of if I wanted to truly live.
I started with the external changes: rapidly switched my diet and purged toxic makeup and household items, then I focused on parenting my inner self. I was like my own lab rat, spending all my time/energy neural conditioning myself to literally create a new me; I was healing the story of who I was. It wasn't easy implementing these changes especially when everyone else around me, my whole community operated on a different set of rules, but I always kept my end goal in mind. That's the power of hope, gratitude, and vision: it keeps you going. I worked on accepting my incurable diagnosis but I couldn’t accept what was expected of my prognosis.
Today, I’m able to listen to my body, become more in tune with it and move towards ways of thinking and being that makes me feel better in my body, mind and soul. It’s been eight years of this disciplined journey and my only focus is being fully committed to living deeply and controlling what I can. I now live by the rule of putting all the intensity of myself into moments and living them as if they were my last because tomorrow isn’t promised.
Admittingly I wasn’t always sanguine about my situation. Fear and anxiety still get the best of me but I remind myself about where I’m at today; no longer spending energy on surviving but rather on creating, healing, and loving. I’m able to take it day by day into the unknown. All of this is to say: time has a way of softening and I’m happy to be here—even at a snail’s pace. xx