trail blazer | Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion

This is the very first Guest Post on this blog and I’m excited for the future.

So welcome to my very first guest blogger, who is none other than Grace Quantock, wellness provocateur, writer and founder of Healing Boxes CIC and Sick Chick to Trail Blazer. She is thriving with multiple autoimmune illnesses and lives in south Wales. Feel free to join the Trail Blazers’ Movement by signing up to the newsletter at sickchicktotrailblazer.com and follow Grace on twitter @grace_quantock

Another Way is Possible.

This is an urgent SOS sent direct to your hopeful heart. The way things are now is not the way they must stay. There is a place between cured and always sick, and you can play there.

I am writing this to you now, but I am also writing to the me I was 5 years ago.

Slumped in an old brown arm chair in front of a window that faced a blue tit’s nest, I stared at the tiny black box of a TV. I was dressed in a blue checkered cotton shirt of my husband’s, worn soft with age and I had crawled to the armchair directly from bed.

I was tired, my days seemed filled with insurmountable tasks – like moving, dressing or brushing my teeth.

And after all the diagnostic dead ends that we had reached over and over, the doctors and I all puzzled about where to go from here. How to even begin to correct my recaltricant body back onto a healthy path?

I realised that under all that, under the pain, and all the exhaustion, I was bored.

Truly, utterly, incalculably bored.

I hadn’t planned for my life to go like this (who does?) but once I’d cried myself out, I’d slumped in bed and spent months gazing at ‘Friends’ and wondering if I could ever get my hair to go like Rachel’s if I couldn’t lift a hairbrush.

But TV is boring and ultimately, I wanted to know, now I was stuck with these illnesses, what was I going to do with my life?

The answer to that came gradually, but it began in the moment I asked that question.

Because struggling under the weight of an illness is not our only option. We do have hope and access to support – I’m not talking cures, I’m talking about ways we can learn to live well with the challenges we face.

We can learn how to rock our hospital appointments

Make a check-list of packing to support us

Learn how to deal with a new diagnosis

Rehabilitate our attitudes to rest

Find ways to deal with our emotional tangles

And turn our challenges into leverage.

I know you are amazing and I want to be part of a world in which your talents are expressed and enjoyed. I believe they are too important to allow illness to hold them back.

Are you with me?