Rose Tinted Recta-cles

When I think back to my life before I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease, it seems I'm wearing rose-tinted spectacles so tight they're almost superglued to my skull.
In my somewhat hazy memories of my pre-pain, 'healthy' life, my days were filled to bursting with fun. Dancing, drinking, romance, abandon, performing 14hr shifts with as little as a 10 minute break, never worrying about running out of toilet paper… the list goes on. However, it’s very easy to focus on the good stuff in the past when in the present might not particularly feel so great.

Torturing yourself with perhaps not entirely accurate moments from your past can be unhealthy and detrimental to your recovery. I learned this to my cost in the process of beginning to write my own Crohn’s book. I thought it would be a good idea to refresh myself in how exactly I felt pre-Crohn’s, post-Crohn’s and all the nasty gory bits in the middle, by reading my old diaries. I’ve kept a diary since the age of 14 so I had plenty to work with. I half expected to see a massive change in my lifestyle, to read dejectedly as the pages turned from joy to misery in the space of the weeks and months leading up to my diagnosis. I didn’t.

I read about a woman who was growing and learning about her body and her heart. Learning how to use her own mind, how to separate the wheat from the chaff in her social circles and how to treat those around her with kindness. I read about a woman becoming a woman, in every sense of the word, and worrying about not becoming the type of woman she, or others wanted her to be. About a woman who was completely and utterly pant-wettingly terrified about what was happening to her body and about losing herself and the people around her. I read about a woman who had a horrific crush on that boy in high school who would have received the blackest of black-eyes from her Dad if he’d so much as come within 15 feet of her.

I cried into my own pages and struggled to remember that this was me. I realised that I had felt incredibly alone in my suffering for a long time, and how happy I am now that I don’t have to go through that loneliness and confusion ever again. As I read my own forgotten words I felt sorry for this woman and wanted to tell her it would get better. That people love her and won’t desert her, and that eventually the pain will get easier to bear. And that she will end up with a hilarious and handsome man who loves cats just as much as her, because miracles do happen.