The Invisible Man

MS Sucks!! To be quite blunt, it just sucks. Being a person who lives with the love of my life, who’s afflicted with MS, I fall short every day.

It’s not a visual affliction. It lays buried beneath the layers of a man. On the surface is the man we all know and love, but beneath what is seen are several, “I just have to deal with it’s.” Those are the things we can not understand, because we don’t have to live with them in our lives. How often do you have conversations and repeat what you’ve said, not realizing you just said it or go to turn around and our knees become weak when just a second ago they were strong? Things you know can seem confusing. A normal walk in the grocery store can seem daunting when you’re having moments of weakness. And no one around you can see these moments. Not even the woman you are standing next to, who’s with you every day. Instead we all just look at you funny like you’re just being weird. It’s a lonely world to live in.

This is what has become a new normal. It’s not something that you feel open to talk to people about. You try and let co workers and friends know that you are having some MS symptoms, but the little bit they see, just causes a funny look to come back at you. Soon you just stop trying to discuss it. You become the invisible man. Why bother?

When a flower loses light to feed it, it dies, and the dying flower grows blooms of depression.

There’s things we all don’t talk about. We all have a dying flower somewhere in our lives growing blooms of depression that we struggle with. We cover it all by sharing all the pretty parts of our lives on social media, our pretty flowers. That’s the world we live in now. How sad for today’s generation to not see that people struggle. We look away from the homeless in our neighborhoods and struggling mothers. We only want to look at the pretty flowers. Shame on us.

Stop judging! Stop it! We’re all guilty of this. We don’t want to be judged, but we judge others freely. We have to stop the cycle.

Talk to the people you love about the dying flowers in their lives. Help the invisible man come out to be seen. You’re probably not going to fix what’s broken in them, but being seen might be all they need.

The only one who can fix our dying flowers are ourselves. We alone hold the keys to fix our lives. We chose how we allow ourselves to feel and act several times a day. Yes, people can “make” us feel a certain way, but it’s still a choice we have to make to feel it. Choose wisely.

I struggle to see my invisible man. I love him so much, but yet I’m so blind. He’s a proud man who has a huge heart and always thinks of others. He never puts himself first, so now that’s my job. I must make an effort to help him be seen, heard and loved by those around him. I need to understand what it is that’s nurturing in his life and offer him more of that. Guess I see lots more walks in the woods in my future.

MS will not likely be cured tomorrow, so we have to deal with it today. I ask and pray that we all do a better job of seeing the invisible man standing next to us, at the grocery store, the laundry mat or whatever we are. Cause he’s right there waiting to be seen.