Blog inspiration and a few other thoughts

Hello again,

Today, I wanted to share a few thoughts which have been on my mind. Be warned, the tone of this post is probably a bit more serious and less upbeat than my usual. Who knows, maybe it is because I'm spending Valentine's Day sitting in a computer lab on campus. #engineering :-P

First, I wanted to talk for a moment about unity and togetherness, especially between people with chronic illnesses. I'm not sure how many of you have read the short bio on the right side of the blog, but in there it talks about my motivation for starting this blog in the first place. While I was on an intership, I was in a meeting where it came up that I had a chronic, incurable (at the moment) disease. I don't remember how exactly it had come up, but that is not the important part. The important part is when one of my coworkers, John, talked to me after the meeting about my CMT. During the course of our conversation, John revealed to me that he had Cystic Fibrosis. If you know what CF is, you know it is quite a scary disease. He said he felt comfortable talking to me about it because I had CMT, like we had a sort of bond because we've both experienced the hardships of a broken body. At first that caught me off guard, because I had never thought about it that way. However, the more I thought about it, the more I knew he was totally right. Turns out John has a blog where he talks about his CF, networks with others who have CF, and generally shares his life story. What an inspiration. One day, he finally convinced me to start this blog, and now because of him, I'm hooked. I invite you to take a look at his blog here.

Anyway, please note that I'm not trying to say that CMT is comparable to CF (not in the least), but  I am trying to say that my experience with CMT has given me more insight into the way someone like John might think and feel. However, I don't think you need to have struggled through a disease to have those insights. Sometimes I think we spend so much time thinking about hiding our problems, or running away from them, and it's easy (for me, at least) to forget that people have all sorts of hardships in their lives. Similar to the materialistic mindset of "If I just had this new gadget/car/phone/thing, I would be more happy in my life," I think it's easy for people like me, or like John, to think that "If I just could cure my CMT/CF, everything in my life would be great!" For the lack of a better term, this is complete bullshit.

Okay, now let me discuss that for a moment, before you get angry. Am I saying that curing CF or CMT would not be a good thing? Absolutely not. Would it be nice to not have CMT? Of course. But would it make me happier? Probably not.

I'm not trying to be de-motivational here, please understand that. I encourage everyone to face their problems head on, and believe me, I am going to fight CMT until my dying breath, but we just need to remember to live our lives along the way. The path to happiness is not a new TV, it's not a mansion with a 10 car garage, and it's definitely not a disease-free body.

I hope y'all have a good weekend!


Joey