That is Why it’s Worth Sharing an Uplifting Story

(My partner cried)

This piece goes along well with a 25-minute recent news appearance on Al Jazeera regarding healthcare in the US.

It’s a Part Two (sort of?) do this unedited, uncut iteration of a longer piece that was published in partial on CF News Today.

Plus, as a THANK YOU bonus so you don’t feel shortchanged:

I’ll include some little photo snaps and moments of the last couple of weeks (tomorrow) that I likely won’t share elsewhere?

Just to keep showing my gratitude for your kind and understanding and love!

Sending all of the above right back

xo,

B

I’m writing about something uplifting today.

But before I do… I have to tell you the sad part first.

For context: I’m not just someone with a chronic illness. I also have chronic cynicism.

To be fair, it’s been founded over many years of exisestential experiences, and I fought it for as long as I could. Unfortunately, humans hold far more power by the weight of our tongue than we ever fully seem to recognize.

I have seen what just one unfounded rumor can do to someone’s life, livelihood, legacy, purely because humans don’t always cite their sources or have time to research whatever negativity they’re unintentionally spreading before the wildfire begins. Once someone believes something to be real, it often doesn’t even matter what’s actually true and what isn’t… How we perceive someone in this world is often more important than who they actually are.

Tragically, this means that I (like many out there) have been burned alive more than once by the worst of human nature… and sadly, I still don’t even know if some of those humans know their culpability of not. We all so rarely do. I know I certainly don’t in the many times that I have been the “worst of” someone’s life.

I’d like to think that I’ve learned and grown from all of my many “worst of”s… But how many of us can ever do more than keep trying, when the whole point of growth as we grow older is that it never stops?

Yet even though the worst of myself (the cynical part) has astronomical trust issues with the world right now, and can only focus on the handful of tragic interpersonal losses that have lit my life’s bridges on fire (instead of the hundreds of beautiful ones out there) … I was recently reminded of how humane some humans can be too.

To put it bluntly: Times have been tough for us lately.

I just wrote about how expensive it can be to be a one-ish income household when you’re also dealing with progressive or ongoing illness, but I have been dealing with a laundry list of things that many also deal with all the time.

I can’t afford the gas to get to work most days where my paycheck is halved because of the cost of the gas to get there (if I can get there).

My car- affectionally named Trent Reznor- is barely held together (that’s my set up for a Nine Inch Nails architectural joke, right?) The heat doesn’t work in my car, so I shiver all the way to and from the afore mentioned job, and then I walk into a mostly-cold house to shiver until I get close enough to our many space heaters, that make our electrical bill sky high because we can’t afford to fix our heat currently. That is irony on irony in every way (an irony sandwich)

But that is certainly not the uplifting part of this week’s ‘column’.

We recently had our water stop working in the dead of winter.

This was only two weeks after I’d had my latest major surgery and was very much amid all the other electricity and heating problems… Yet then, a local person in our town volunteer to help us get everything up and running.

No matter how much family’s plan, or how hard we put our grit to the grindstone: Negative things are going to happen, and from those “worst ofs”, it’s easy to become chronically cynical.

Sometimes, it feels like we work and work, and give and give, and save and save… and only find heartbreak or bad happenstance in return. And I know that many can relate to that. And even more so if you’re going through a lung transplant and have to live out of state, or you’re in the hospital right now with an exacerbation, or worse.

A patient with Cystic Fibrosis can take their medicines perfectly…and still eventually get sick.

Therefore, a person can work and save and try to do everything just right, and still have too many things break at the same time, and the wrong time.

My partner was so touched and relieved that someone was able to help us, that he cried (something I thought he was biologically incapable of doing), and that is why it’s worth sharing an uplifting story right on the heels of a very honest column about systematic healthcare poverty last week, because…

Sometimes, right after the rain, there’s a rainbow.

(And if you’re a cynic, you hate that last sentence too.)

This is a continuation of yesterday’s work.

(So if it doesn’t make sense or have a good flow… Be sure to read in congruence with yesterday, pretty please!)

Maybe it stands alone without the connective threads?

Writing can definitely be a choose your own adventure that way.