When faced with a serious illness, it’s easy to feel sorry for ourselves, feel like a victim or a martyr, or to become bitter. In our darkest moments, it’s not unusual to wonder if the universe has simply turned its back on us.
These are all very natural feelings, and it’s okay to allow ourselves to experience them instead of ignoring them or pretending they don’t exist. When going through something terrible, it’s understandable to want to feel all the feels for a little while, the important thing is that you don’t stay in that place for too long.
To put ourselves on the path towards healing both physically and emotionally, we want to get to a place where we can try to look at our illness with fresh eyes and an open mind. When we experience this seminal paradigm shift moment, it is often the catalyst to significant change.
We can then ask ourselves the important question, “What is my illness trying to teach me?”
My own personal experience made me a big believer that, often, when we are faced with a serious illness it’s because there is something we need to learn, and the illness itself is the conduit for this learning.
Especially for the most stubborn of us, less drastic attempts by the universe to teach us may not be sufficient, and knocking us completely off our feet may be the ONLY way to get our full attention. It’s likely the only way to get us to be still, and to become open to listening, hearing, and growing as a result of the difficult experience.
After experiencing this myself as well as seeing it play out in the lives of others, I’ve come to understand that a serious illness can have the potential to actually turn out to be a gift.
When I nearly died from a monster flare-up of the autoimmune disease Ulcerative Colitis back in 2010, it certainly did not seem or feel like a gift at the time. My illness quickly stole my health, my freedom, and worst of all, my ability to be a functioning mother to my baby girl. What it gave me instead was pain, suffering, and an intense fear that I wouldn’t get out of it alive. Over the course of an entire year I often felt like a prisoner in my own body. I felt alone, scared, and increasingly desperate. Rather than anything even beginning to resemble a gift, I would have described the entire experience as a cruel joke.
But as brutal as that extended moment in time was for me, amazingly what I’ve gradually realized over the past 12+ years since, is that my illness was actually the channel through which my greatest life’s lessons have been taught to me.
So what did my illness want to teach me? Well…kind of everything.
Having the experience of nearly dying made me rethink things on an existential level. It forced me to take a look at the big questions in life, those questions that up until that point, I’d been able to avoid. Questions such as, “Who am I, really? Why am I here? What do I believe, instead of what have I been told to believe? What is my purpose?”
My illness taught me what gratitude really is, and that all moments, even the mundane and the challenging, are all a part of my story. It taught me about compassion and justice. It allowed me to see what really matters, and then allowed me to begin to prioritize accordingly.
It taught me how to open my eyes and see and appreciate beauty, art, and all forms of creativity that inspire and bring the “being alive” part of living into my life. As cliché as it sounds, my illness really did teach me to stop and smell the roses.
My illness taught me I’m not here to wallow in my own troubles, but rather to experience them with whatever courage and strength I can muster, to heal from them, and to look for the lessons in them, and then to use all of that to experience a much fuller life, while being of service to others.
A few of these lessons I learned quickly, but most of them have slowly melded into my understanding over the years since. My illness is STILL teaching me every day, and I hope that will continue for the rest of my life.
When you come so close to staring death in the face, if you are lucky enough to get out alive, you are bound to be intrinsically and fundamentally changed. My illness tore my whole world down to the studs, yet it mercifully left me with the foundation to slowly, solidly rebuild a much better life.
So what may your illness be trying to teach you? Maybe you need to learn to prioritize taking care of yourself. Maybe you need to finally face past traumas that have held you back for too long. Maybe you’re holding onto things that can be let go of. Maybe you need to change some small but significant things, or maybe, like myself, it’s time for you to reevaluate everything.
Perhaps asking this question before starting a meditation session can help get the process going for you. Or a vulnerable conversation with a trusted friend may be what gets the ball rolling. You may begin to find some answers by getting yourself out into nature, or through a productive session with a good therapist. The key is to keep asking yourself good questions, have patience, and remain open to what your illness has to say.
Healing our body is one thing, healing our soul is quite another. How wonderful that even through something as terrible as a serious illness, we can still graciously be given the gift of life-changing lessons.
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