What Does Life With Lupus Look Like In 5 Years?

Looking at Facebook on my phone, I see a post that reads, “What would you do if you had a glimpse for one hour of where your life would be in 5 years, and it was nothing like you thought? Would it change how you live your life now?” The post was displaying information for a virtual book discussion of the novel, In Five Years by Rebecca Serle. Hmm, this question lingered in my thoughts. Could I honestly even answer this question…could I imagine my life in 5 years? What was I willing and able, to do to change things?

Contemplating the future

This prompted me to think of all of us in the lupus community…daily, living our lives that have been touched by illness and difficulty. What were we able and willing to do? Did we even want to think about 5 years from now, knowing that we may be in worse condition? Or…could we imagine the benefit in changing things today, to impact our lives down the road?

Sometimes for me, I intellectually know and believe things…yet I cannot always translate that into action. As many of us know, it is actually our emotions that motivate us to take action. THINK – FEEL – ACT! You can know what to do, and still not do it. You might even be able to list all the reasons, scientific facts, and figures, and believe with 100 percent certainty that this is what you need to do. So, where is the disconnect? You are still not doing it! I’ll tell you. It is because you do not FEEL it!

Creating change

Creating change, at its’ core, tends to be a boring methodical process. It’s all about the habits we create and put in place…daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. This is enough for anyone to say…eh, I’ll get to it eventually. Here’s the rub: We will never make something a habit without making it a priority and committing to it. We may do things here and there, and that provides just enough change or movement in the right direction to make us believe we have created change. That would be a false belief. We haven’t created lasting change, and thus…in a week, a month, even year(s)…we find ourselves faced with similar circumstances.

The reason many of us do not commit to these habits in order to move the needle in our lives…feelings. Yes, I said it! Feelings! The inner child screams out, “I don’t wanna!” You worked hard all day and want to veg out on the sofa and watch television. You are completely stressed out or anxious about things going on and want to numb out. You can’t face the reality of your circumstances and so you distract with food, a cocktail (or two), television, shopping, etc. to give you some of those feel-good chemicals in your brain. I get it…I’ve been there…I’m still there! Haha.

So how do we really create change then? I’ll tell you. We are going to use our feelings as a springboard into action!

Learn more in Part 2 of In Five Years...