In recent years my blogging had become sporadic at best as my health declined and my children grew. The toll of having a debilitating illness while raising two kids and trying to earn enough money to maintain a decent standard of living in NYC was near incalculable and so something – no, many things – had to give.
I stopped blogging because I lacked the time and the energy but also because the assault of challenging circumstances was so terrifying that for a while I could hardly process what was happening to me, let alone attempt to write about it for others. My pull-back from the world of social media (in tandem with my pulling away from a career in marketing) expanded and by spring of last year I was hardly checking email and off Facebook completely. While I gradually lost contact with my online community something interesting and most welcome happened: I connected with my real life local community.
When my health woes were at their worst and I felt completely unsocial it was my local community who reached out. People started showing up. They’d knock on my door offering food, they’d volunteer to babysit or pitch in with errands, they’d offer advice and share their personal stories of hardship, grief and triumph.
I learned about incredible and heart-wrenching stories of disease, loss and pain that my community collectively, and too often silently, suffered. I learned how they coped and how they broke down. I heard about their darkest most despairing moments and I heard about the incredible strength that they all drew on to overcome. They shared their techniques for getting through the hardest days and their skills for generating the ever essential medicine of joy and laughter. I accepted their advice and friendship gratefully. Despite my near complete withdraw from the online “social” community along with my terrifying descent into complete blindness, I had never felt more inspired and connected n my life.
On Simchat Torah, weeks after having the surgery that restored vision to my right eye, a woman I hardly knew approached me – in tears – to tell me that she had been following the story of my recovery and that she was enduring a very serious illness, something she’d hidden from the community, but that it gave her courage and strength to hear about me. I was touched but perplexed, I didn’t see myself as doing something particularly extraordinary. Rather I felt that I was simply doing my best to cope with difficult circumstances. I took it to heart however and I started paying more attention to what people were interested in when they were asking about my health and my life. I realized that in addition to wanting specific advice and guidance about the many health and dietary issues that I’ve become a lay-expert in – that many were also interested in those same pieces of wisdom that carried me, and of course people loved sharing in the wonder of my vision’s recovery.
I don’t generally feel like a particularly inspiring person – mostly I feel disheveled and vulnerable and kind of a wreck – but I do get that I have had to conjure up some pretty intense doses of endurance, self-discipline and faith to cope and thrive as a person and as a mother over these last few years. I also get that on the outside my recovery has been pretty dramatic. I’ve lost 80 pounds and I went blind, and then got my sight back – something so miraculous even I cannot begin to fully process it. I mostly don’t feel like I earned any of this but rather that it was a combination of luck, miracles and surrounding myself with the most talented, intelligent medical minds I could find. But it has been one hell of a journey, far from over, and as I feel so grateful for the community who lent their strength and wisdom to me, I do feel an urge to pay it back, and pay it forward.
So I’m restarting the blog. I will talk mainly about my health journey and attempt to offer as much practical advice and resources as I can. I will make an effort to answer the questions I get from my friends and community about my health condition, about genetic disorders and auto-immune diseases – finding them, treating them, living with them – raising kids who have them and more. I hope you enjoy and learn from it and I really and truly hope that you share your thoughts and experiences with me in return because what I’ve learned is more healing than all else is the community that we are for each other.
Shabbat Shalom!
Jenny Is A Mommy 