The lemons of life and too much lemonade

You know the saying ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?

Well, I've been making a lot of lemonade lately.

I've been on extended sick leave for a month now due to an auto immune disease flaring up that seems to be unwilling to be medicated the way it used to.

It’s one of those diseases (ulcerative colitis) that leaves you completely weak and with no energy, able only to move from bed to couch to bathroom.

When life is reduced to the essentials of self care: sleep, food, shower, repeat, your brain goes to weird places.

I am an artist and writer and usually work through any lows by writing or art journaling. I have no energy or brain capacity for that.

I'm a nature lover and when things are down I simply walk into the woods to make me instantly feel better and uplifted. I now hardly have the energy to go downstairs to do laundry.

So I sit.

I watch Netflix.

I fall asleep.

I read.

I fall asleep.

I think a lot.

About the psychosomatic connections of any illness.

About what I'm digesting.

So I made a list.

Of all the things I've had to digest in life. The small, the crappy and the monstrous.

I wrote it all down.

Wow. What a list.

No wonder my intestines are struggling.

So I sit.

I visualize all those things passing through me. Some of them getting stuck, nesting into the inner lining of my colon.

Why do they stay there? Why are they not moving through? What keeps them there?

In recent therapy sessions we’ve tackled ‘emotions’ a lot and how I handle them. Very often, when these emotions are too strong, seem unmanageable or simply unfair, I push them away. Either by ignoring them, brushing them off or telling myself not to be a sissy.

It’s very hard to choose another way when this has been your default setting.

But all those repressed and ignored emotions have lodged themselves inside me. They have created an unhealthy ecosystem in my intestines that now no longer let's me do much else but sit, sleep and spend a lot of time in the bathroom.

I have a lot of tests to undergo to find the drugs that will work this time.

At the same time, I'm sitting with my list thinking about the next step.

I want to art over it.

I want to scratch into it.

I want to burn it.

But I feel it needs a little more digestion before it becomes clear how I can help myself pass this lemonade.