Pleasantly faking it

Social media is all about highlighting the moments of your life that are working. However, I still want to be honest and show that Lyme Disease is a awful disease. I’m very frequently torn between putting on a good face and showing how frustrating it actually is. This week has been the hardest ones for a bit now and what is posted is a happy photo.

First I caught a cold that I tried to muscle through, then I started herxing from my cold remedies, and thats when things got ugly. I woke up in one of those anxiety binds where your brain tells you that sitting up or moving 2inches will be the death of you. Most of the morning I spent in ball, only to get up for detoxers. The grip slowly wore off until I remembered an errand that could not be put off and I wound back up. My boyfriend got me through my errand, an issue that would have been a mini disaster without his help so when he ordered pizza later I offered to get it since I didn’t feel like my chest was being slowly crushed anymore.

At the pizza place, they are rude, they don’t have his order, then they do, then they make me wait. As I paced the foyer, I started winding back into my anxiety ball. After 15 minutes I left with the pizza, which I would find out later was the wrong order. I got in the car and cried till I got home because I was so tired of every second of this day being so hard. I had very little control over how I felt, which is one of the things I find hardest to accept about Lyme. I never had anxiety before. I don’t have anxiety. I have Lyme which gives me anxiety.

Another layer of this frustration is that I believed when I finished my antibiotics from Jemsek, I should be mostly better. Ending antibiotics and switching to herbs has proved to me that this is far from the truth. My herxing has been hugely neurological, telling me that the antibiotics did a really poor job getting the bacteria out of my brain. I’m excited to get home for Christmas because there awaits a new stress herbal blend from my favorite herb master. I have high hopes that this will be a tool I can use to fully suppress the unnecessary anxiety. If it wasn’t for the set of herbs I already had in hand today, I would have probably never left my bed.

I went through a fairly miserable day and there is no record of it till now because I don’t know how you show that and still want to be someone others spend time with. 95% of my pre-Lyme friends are gone. My Lyme friends suffer with the same issues and worse so there’s no reason to complain to them. They get it. Drawing the line between honesty and presenting the person you want to be is an issue that I struggled with before Lyme and even more now. No one could air all of their issues all the time or else they would have no friends but where do you cross into faking it?