Sharing My Heart: My Lyme Disease Journey.
I am currently fighting for my life through a decade-long battle with Lyme disease — a name and label I do not see as Me.
Metaphysically, it is known to be a death/rebirth process, and let me tell you, this is accurate. It strips you bare of absolutely all that you think you are and know, and you remain one of the lucky ones if you manage to hold on to the faith in your coming rebirth.
99% of the diabolical journey takes place behind closed doors that feel tightly locked, and it is not pretty. I have been brought down on my knees by this illness an infinite number of times. I have lost my mind a thousand times over, grieved great losses, and had deep comprehensions on the subject of my own mortality.
In my country, some of my peers have been physically thrown out of doctors’ rooms for merely mentioning the name of their dis-ease, and we are often treated like the lepers of society. We are yanked out of the 9-5 and our personas, roles and relationships, cast aside and beyond the reach of the supposed medi-care system.
We do not even fit the bill of socially acceptable terminal battles, and few morning teas and rallies are held in our honor. The most effective treatments and therapies are dangled beyond our financial reach, and we are encouraged and filtered down onto the hamster wheel of government pensions, labels and loops.
Even those nearest and dearest to us more often than not wind up bowing down to the projection of their own frustrations: Why aren’t you getting better? Or worse still, there are no “Are you alright?’s” or “How are you?’s” at all, and we are simply forgotten.
It seems chronic illness soon gets boring.
True compassion and empathy from our beloveds is sometimes just a pipe dream, and a painful lesson I feel we must hold on to resourcefully to illuminate and initiate us into finding our innate, inner strength and sovereignty. To keep clawing our way out, to rise above.
And on this path I have also known the earth angels, in the form of the many who do extend unconditional kindness and support, at times moving heaven and earth just to lend an ear or make the impossible possible through community and selfless care.
All those smiles from strangers, the humility I have felt in learning to receive gracefully, to know of another’s belief in me, and the real messages of support and love — these have all been life-sustaining presents of presence that have saved me.
This existence has undoubtedly pushed me upwards and outwards, onto the precipice, as I have, in fact, been gifted the most beauty-full tenderness and raw connection to all that is living and what it means to be alive. I tend to reside there, on this precipice, and this is the place I strive to share my heart from as best I can, through expression and creativity in many forms.
My layers have been forcefully peeled, top to bottom and inside out, and my skins continue to shed.
I am all too familiar with others’ facades and broken promises. External parties that remain unawares of the cruelty and cost of ignorance and assumption. I am often gauged and judged purely on the 2-D interface of social profile, as the idiocy (and insanity) of our reality has fallen to such depth. It’s as if we truly believe our spirits and screens are one and the same.
Through this illness I have even known the jokers of the savior complex, often presented in my circumstance as narcissistic men, being run by their own opportunistic desires for Self, magnets for co-dependency. Kidding themselves, but not me, in grand yet shallow gestures of help that soon crumble when a woman is real.
I have been turned away by the ones I love the most more times than I care to remember. Feeling alien to the world and its occupants at large, but choosing the repeat dive inwards, to know who this being truly is, independent of all others, yet intrinsically interwoven with the All.
I have sensed and forged hard for shifts in my mental body and its vital re-wiring, re-setting and fundamental relinquishing of false programs, distortions and conditioning — all that serve as the breeding ground for dis-harmony and dis-ease.
My energetic heart seems to endlessly grow in its expansion and intensity, often feeling so utterly exposed that I sense absolutely everything that wants to draw and feed into it, and how precious it is to hold the heart-reins and treasure the care towards who, what and where our light is shared. That we own individual responsibility in how our natural imprint is expressed in its purest form.
Would I be contemplating all of the above without this physical/metaphysical invader that has buried itself in my mind/body/soul? Probably not. Do I feel that these concepts of abhorrent warfare and conspiracy behind these illnesses are plausible? Absolutely. I have lived it and I am living it.
I believe that many of us sensitive souls become the ones who are knocked off our feet with such life afflictions and hellish paths that will ultimately remain in ineffable silence. And I believe this is very deliberate in a deeper, profound sense.
But I pray to be more than lucky, and that this is me — a Heart Creature — being rebirthed into all my glory by the very dis-ease intended to break me.
Let us try not to judge others or their journeys, rather just hold them, hear them, and see them… with love.
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An ongoing journey with life and health has led Ange Sang back to her true creative therapy, through the written word and the lens of the camera. Ange is a devoted lover of all things nature, a tree-hugger, and has a heart that feels utterly compelled to shoot arrows of word and image, straight from her mystical experience of life to as many receivers as possible. On a unique path of physical illness, Ange began to share her written and visual arts as tools of thanks — a nod to an ever-rising theme of gratitude, in recognition of those around her. Her heart-vision continues to find its solace and drive in the grace of Mama Nature and the aim to recognize and articulate the grapple of the human condition.
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