Under the weather..

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Today I woke up feeling sick. Not deathbed sick, just that achey “things aren’t quite right” kind of sick. I have been sick, the kind of sick that lands you on IV antibiotics in the hospital. But most of us, myself included, don’t get sick like that often. But this morning I felt under the weather.. Sick? Perhaps.

Illness is the body’s way of telling us something. So when I woke up feeling just exactly as if someone had crushed my body and stolen all of its heat, I decided to listen. It’s hard, because the urge is there.. Run to the cabinet, get the Advil. Numb it. Get better as fast as possible. We are like that, aren’t we? We’re tired, we drink coffee. We are sore, we take medicine. Reactive.. We are so reactive.

This morning, as I lay in bed with my alarm beeping every nine minutes, I decided to just let it be. I didn’t get up and shoot meds. I didn’t get up and whine (ok, I did a little) about my sore muscles. I just got up and decided to accept my discomfort. As the morning wore on, headache and all, I became proactive instead of reactive.

I took my husband to work, deposited Simon at his preschool and quickly shot back as much wheatgrass as I could manage. I was going to beat whatever it was in my body that decided that today was the day to give up and be sick. I felt better. Better enough to make it through the grocery store and home. I felt decent until about midday. I then made a HUGE amount of green juice and promptly downed half of it. Again, proactive is my mantra here..

Sadly by about 3 pm or so, I was miserable. Despite my great efforts at outwitting my body, I felt just as dead as I had earlier and a little bit worse. Nutrition doesn’t always fix things, I guess. I tried, I really did. But I decided to just rest for the evening. And wouldn’t you know, I felt better not long after that.

I don’t tell this rather mundane story just to “blog” and register my life on the ticker. I tell it because of what it has taught me. Ever the student, I have learned a valuable lesson today, from being sick.

What I learned is that my body is not broken. There’s no defect in the system. Whatever was going on (and still is to some extent) on my insides was not a mistake. I believe our bodies are amazing creations. We are capable of so much. We can heal ourselves or harm ourselves. There is surely plenty to be said for taking care of yourself, eating well, and getting the things we need. There is plenty to be said for listening to our pain and knowing when to actually reach for those pills. But there is a disconnect that I think we have to find before we can understand what is truly happening to us when we are under the weather. There is fear we have to let go of, discomfort we have to overcome, and impulses we must break free from before we can ever be proactive.

Illness is not always a mistake. It’s not always bad to feel discomfort and pain. Sometimes that pain, even when it seems unbearable, is doing more than we can ever imagine. Sometimes the little aches and pains, headaches and fevers are doing work that we can’t even see. Sometimes we have to go with it. Stop trying to fix it. And just be sick.

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Filed under Raw food, Raw vegan, blogging, life, writing

Tags: blogging, life, Raw food, Raw vegan, writing