Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Abandoned Fibro Blogs

I just unsubscribed from over a dozen blogs written by fibromyalgia sufferers about their lives with fibromyalgia. All of them have not published a post in over a thousand days. Nothing. Where did they all go?

Several years back, around the time of the great Facebook revolution, I did a brief stint on Twitter. While there, I found a group of fellow fibromites and some of them had blogs. We subscribed to each other's blogs and created our own, (myself included,) exchanging stories and insights about our many challenges. We wrote frequently back then, as there was a lot we had to say.

Maybe it's all been said now. I feel like I'm caught up on all the nuances of this fibro life, yet I still look for news and different perspectives here and there. Once in a great while, I share my own.

This has become clear recently while reviewing my Facebook Memories from years past. I used to post about my pains and health challenges, and sometimes my health victories. Now, I feel I don't want to bore or annoy my Facebook friends with the tedium of my particular collection of health problems. They may not understand what it's like to live like this, but maybe they don't need to.

I have learned that most everyone has their own set of problems. Would I want to read about them all? Wouldn't I start to see certain people as their most frequent complaints? This is not how I want people to see me. I am a person with interests and convictions. I look for opportunities to be more interesting. I am trying to live life.

Hopefully the lost fibro bloggers are all out living their lives and trying not to wallow in their pain. Although I know blogging is a good outlet for dealing with the struggles of living with an invisible illness, I know it can have the unfortunate consequence of limiting one's ability to move beyond that focus.

Today, my advice is to try to forget the bad and focus on the good, the positive. What can you do? What can you enjoy. Be a whole person.