5 ways Fibromyalgia makes you awesome

Today I dropped a bunch of 2 x 4s on my foot. It's swollen and bruised, but after letting off a few swear words I went back to my original task. My son asked me if I was going to rest my foot and was surprised when I told him no. His question made me realize that I'm just used to functioning on a much higher level of pain than normal people. What's a swollen foot compared to pain spread throughout your entire body? That's when I realized that I was awesome and kind of a bad ass. Not only am I awesome, but so is anyone else with Fibromyalgia or any other chronic illness.

5 Ways Fibromyalgia makes you awesome (and a straight up bad ass!) 

1. You have a real life superpower. You can withstand incredible amounts of pain that would knock a healthy person flat on their back. You walk around like normal, but inside you are stronger than everyone else because you have been through so much.

2. You sympathize with others. Whether they are feeling physical, emotional, or spiritual pain, the battles you have fought taught you to care for other people. You know what it's like to struggle, to be misunderstood, to be ignored, and you don't want other people feeling that way.

3. You can find joy in the smallest things. The limitations of your disease have taught you to take nothing for granted. You may notice the sound of the birds, or the color of the sky more than you did before you got sick. You don't take a good day for granted, even if you don't do anything exciting.

4. You adapt well to change.  No one likes change and most people avoid it as much as possible. And yet you face uncertainty every single day and manage to conquer it. Each day you wake up and you have no idea how you're going to feel and how it's going to effect your life, it's a complete guessing game. Yet you manage to adjust to whatever your body throws at you every single day.

5. You are a medical expert. When you first got sick you thought the doctors would take care of you, but you quickly learned that most doctors are less than helpful. So you waded into the murky waters of the internet trying to find more information. You learned what sources were accurate and what sources should be discarded. You figured out the minutia of your disease and found a way to live with it. You literally know more about your illness than most doctors, and that makes you awesome.