Defeated

After my Rheumiversary in August, November 8th served as the next most important date on my RA calendar. On November 8th, 2011, I seriously began RA treatment under the watchful gaze of a rheumatologist. As that date approached, arrived, and sped quickly away this year, I found myself falling further and further into what often feels like an endless pit. After a year of treatment, shouldn't I feel better? After a year of pumping all these injections and pills into my body, shouldn't my RA show some kind of response? 

I've spent the last three months lost in my own thoughts. I have slept, awoken, learned, traveled...I have lived in constant physical pain. While this is not unusual for me, the pain has become so much more than just a frustration. As I counted down to my one year treatment benchmark, my pain turned into a menace. It haunted all my social interactions, alienating me from almost everyone I value. It trailed behind me as I tried to enjoy my travels, and all the experiences and vacations I had the pleasure to embark upon in 2012. It kept me from doing the simplest things -  taking notes for school became a discouraging impossibility. Getting up to turn in my daily assignments felt like a monstrous, hopeless effort. Worst of all, I didn't have the positivity, the hope and the spirit to continue pushing forward. 

When I started this blog, and started my journey through RA, I insisted continuously that I would never let this disease define who I am. I declared that I would not let it beat me. 

It has. I haven't written a blog in three months because I am so ashamed to admit, to myself, to my readers, to my friends and loved ones, that I feel utterly and completely defeated by my illness. One day, struggling to work on an assignment for my philosophy course, I turned to DJ and cried, "I hate how my arthritis has taken over my whole life." He looked at me for a moment and said, "It IS your life."Nothing has ever been so torturously true.