Someone should have noticed that we were never looked happy in pictures. Sure there was the initial one month or maybe two weeks worth of giddiness and infatuation, but it ended so quickly. After that, we never looked happy together in pictures.
Maybe he did try to get through the thick wall around my heart. Maybe he only tried to stir me up and piss me off on purpose, simply to get a reaction, any reaction from me. I know I’m cold when in a relationship. I know that I kept that wall up. But I did try in the beginning and you know what, I simply got tired of trying to get him to understand what I was saying to him. Not saying his English was bad. He just couldn’t even understand my fibromyalgia. And so I became even more distant.
You know what having a chronic condition is like? I’m sure it’s crossed the minds of others who have a medical condition that’s incurable.
It’s the feeling of being broken and no one can fix you.
Yes, other people have it worse than me. Yes, some of those cancer patients are my friends. I know I should feel lucky that I’m not in more pain. I know all these things, so rightly so, I don’t complain about my fibromyalgia. But once in a while, I need to let out these thoughts that flit through my mind. Some of them are stirred up and conjured by things that my mom says. Things like, my fibromyalgia will scare off any guy who might want to marry me. That I shouldn’t tell the guy I’m dating that I have fibromyalgia, because no one wants a girl that’s sick like me. You know how that makes me feel? Like I’m broken and no one can fix me.
The most painful part of fibromyalgia for me at least, isn’t the physical pain. It’s the fact that people don’t believe I’m in pain, because it doesn’t show up on x-rays, it doesn’t show up in blood tests. There’s no swelling, I’m not bleeding, there’s nothing on the surface to show that I’m in pain and I can’t be the best that I want to be. And when he couldn’t understand that I was in pain and why I was in pain, I started to shut him out.
Simply put, I know I shut him out. I knew I could never be happy with someone that I couldn’t depend on for support, someone who couldn’t believe me when I said I had a chronic condition and that I was in pain for most of that God-forbidden English winter.
