Growing up I always really loved reading, I still do. But I’m not one to pick up a new book immediately after finishing another. Usually a book impacts my mind and my heart so deeply I become completely consumed with feeling everything the author wrote. I can spend weeks sometimes even months hanging on words from just one story. I am obsessed with stories. I think we all are.

When I was younger I had an extreme obsession with an author who only wrote about young love that almost always ended with one half of that love dying. A lot of people hate to love books and movies about illness and love. I wonder about stories that deal with my kind of ongoing and confusing illness, what about an illness like mine and love? Where no one dies and the illness is dragged out indefinitely. Where there’s not some dramatic and dying element but there is a constant pain that never seems to go away. Sometimes it’s dull but other times it’s banging, beating, screaming. What about a love that goes on and doesn’t have some miraculous fight but goes through the pain that lasts longer than anyone cares to hear about?

I am infatuated with stories. I love watching them on screens, reading them in books, in magazines, and online, being told them in person, and telling them myself. There’s a burning feeling I get after a story hits me hard, it’s a bittersweet burn that hurts but it lights a fire through me where I can’t shut off my mind. I can’t stop thinking about it, feeling it over and over, I feel the pain and the love and it makes me want to create something. It puts a story in my head I had never thought of before, it makes me paint because I’m feeling too much, it makes me feel things I never knew I could. Stories make me feel so fiercely that I’m reminded why I am alive.

I told you I had a deep obsession with an author. Her name is Lurlene McDaniel. She wrote about cancer, organ failure, horrible diseases, that all ultimately end in death. But every book I read of hers had this seemingly beautiful relationship. There was one person going through this horrifying struggle with their health, who is ultimately dying and the other is this amazing support system that doesn’t waver.

Honestly, this probably wasn’t the best thing I could’ve been fixating on. It put this idea in my head that when you’re sick you automatically have someone that isn’t related to you and doesn’t have to go through your sickness with you but chooses to be there for you regardless. When I first got really sick my last semester of high school I was in a relationship and had been for awhile. I didn’t realize it at first, but what all of those stories I had read and been so attracted to were missing was how hard it is to be in a functioning relationship when your entire world is now unfamiliar territory. In a traditional wedding ceremony there is that line that is said, “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health,” where you promise to be there and love your partner no matter what. But when you’re dating and you’re so young there is no covenant made to be broken, there is nothing that says you’re expected to hang around through life altering challenges. You can’t expect someone to flip their world upside down and join you too, you hope for it, but you can’t ask them to.

When I got really sick my senior year I was in a whirlwind and I didn’t know what to anticipate. I didn’t know how serious things were or if I would be better the next day or in 2 years. When you’re in constant pain and being “normal” is such a challenge it’s hard to know what to expect of people around you. I still read books about illness and love sometimes because they’re so interesting to me. I look back on my own journey and the people who have been there for everything are my parents. My mom goes to all of my doctors visits with me and if she can’t be there my dad is or my aunt. I’ve learned it is really hard for someone to go through something with you when they’re not there witnessing it firsthand, seeing everything that you’re going through. Those stories put this idea in my head that there would be someone else who didn’t have to go along but chose to because they loved me enough to go through every dark day with me until I had a good one.

I’m not going to lie to you, after all I promised to be as transparent as I can. My faith has been a wreck more than it’s not been throughout my time being sick. I’ve spent a lot of time being mad at God and ignoring Him, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. I get preoccupied with my anxiety over appointments and treatments or when the pain feels like it’s never going to let up to get even the slightest relief and I forget. I get so busy trying to hang in there and just survive that I forget about who has been by my side the entire time, even when I’m alone and I think no one sees me fall apart. I spend time wondering why I am not like the people in the stories who has that person who chooses to be there through the chaos of sickness, when all along God has been beside me. I’ve been angry, broken down, confused, emotional, unemotional, and have chosen to ignore Him and yet He still stays. He chose me, He loves me, and He walks with me, even through my darkest days.

Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Psalm 139:1-18, 23-24 (NLT)

“O Lord, you have examined my heart, and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! I can never escape your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the winds of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide and the light around me to become night—but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you. You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex. Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me God, the cannot be numbered, I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand. And when I wake up, you are still with me. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.”

If you want to listen to the songs I was listening to when I wrote this click here.