Guest Post: Moving on From a Hard Time

I'm a journalism student on the East Coast of Canada.  My dream is to work at a fashion magazine, but in the meantime I'm keeping busy with my blog!  I started My Beautiful Messy Life in July of 2013, and it began as a chronicle of my life with Crohn's disease.  It's since grown to include... well, everything!  Beauty, food, fitness, fashion, nothing is off-limits for My Beautiful Messy Life!

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Everyone’s got their problems.  Demons, crosses to bear, skeletons in the closet, whatever you want to call them.  We’ve all got something – but how much do we let it affect our lives?

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My “something” really started in eighth grade, when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.  Yes, at a time when everything is awkward, I hit the awkward jackpot.  Try explaining to your friends and teachers what Crohn’s is.  Heck, I still have a hard time explaining it at 20.

The next three years were punctuated with periods of remission (some longer than others) and hospitalization.  All while trying to be normal in middle school, and later high school.  No easy feat.

My “something” ended in my junior year of high school, with the surgery that, for lack of a better word, cured me.  I came out with a few scars – both in the figurative and literal sense.  Today, I’m just going to talk about the figurative ones.

It’s so easy to become jaded after going through a hard time.  I definitely was – but I was pretty good at hiding it.

I think years of downplaying my symptoms to doctors helped.  I like people to think I always have it all together.  It sounds clichéd, but behind closed doors, I didn’t.  After all, I just wanted to be normal!

I felt like I had drawn the short straw in life.  I was angry at all I had been through, and everything that came after.

I wanted my life back, I thought.  But not like this.

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People talk about “moving on” like it’s something that comes very easily.  Like you just wake up on day and say, “I think I’m going to move on today!”

Most of us know it’s not that easy.  For me, it took nearly two years.

For the longest time, I didn’t even want to admit that I hadn’t let go.  I continued on as if nothing had happened, promptly ignoring the feeling in the back of my mind that something wasn’t right.

I had to realize that asking for help wasn’t an admission of weakness.  I dismissed my family’s suggestions that I should see a therapist for an entire year.  Funny, for someone who likes to keep her composure, my family could see that I was losing it.

Moving on is hard to do.  And it’s even harder to do alone.

The best decision isn’t always the easy one, but seeing a therapist was one of the best decisions I made.  It was taking the lid off of all my problems and laying them out in the open.  Confrontation.

Today, I’m in the best place I’ve ever been!  I still have my days – who doesn’t? – but I’m nearly there.  Like I said, moving on doesn’t just happen.  You have to work on it.

We’ve all got something.  It might not ever go away, but that doesn’t mean it has to hold you back.