Looking Forward to It? Or Wishing It Were Over?

’Tis the season of shopping and stresses, of giving and forgiving, of being overcommitted and underprepared; a season when we often want to do more than we can in more ways than are easy for me to count.

When talking with others in the disability community, I find that many of us have gone from looking forward to life’s highlights that once brought us great joy to looking forward to those events or activities being over.

MS Has Changed What We’re Capable of Doing

I think of how I used to spend months planning a Thanksgiving feast for my friends and family. I haven’t cooked anything close to a Thanksgiving Day meal in a dozen years. Many took great pride in decorating for the Christmas holidays, as discussed on an episode of MS Ireland’s Unspeakable Bits webinar series, but now haven’t the energy or inclination for much more than asking someone to put up their predecorated tree.

Birthdays, holidays, travel days — we might find ourselves looking forward to them being over more than we look forward to the actual event.

We set our gaze to the rest period we’ve planned for after, and we get on the best we can, because that’s what we think is expected of us.

Can We Find Joy Again?

But we’re not doing ourselves (or those around us) any favors — unless we’re learning from the experience.

I said that I don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving anymore. Part of that is because we no longer live in the United States any longer, so it’s not something we really miss. There are other holidays celebrated here in Ireland upon which we expend our energy. Christmas is one of them.

I used to be one of those people who went into the woods (all right, the local tree farm) to cut down and drag out a huge evergreen, then I’d spend a full weekend decorating, so that it could all be up within a day or two.

Now it takes better than a week to put up a fraction of the decorations, and I have to clear the calendar before, during, and after to make sure I have a little energy left to enjoy the lights.

But I do enjoy them! I’m sure that I enjoy them more now that I’ve learned to cut back on the expectation, to limit the amount that I put up, and to spread it over days (weeks, if I’m being honest).

Rather than wishing the holiday to be over, I’m back to looking forward to it.

It’s a circular continuum of sorts. Multiple sclerosis (MS) forced us, in small increments, to accept that we’d changed and to modify how we did things. But we took those cues and learned to modify things so that we could once again enjoy them, even if that means enjoying fewer of them, enjoying them differently, or enjoying them from afar.

How to Get Back to Looking Forward

If you’re still in the phase of looking forward to holidays and other events being in the past, know that you can look forward to things again. They might not be exactly as they once were, but it’s for that very fact that you could anticipate again.

Modify, modify, modify. For some it will feel like giving in at first. Then one day, one season, you’ll find yourself looking forward to something because you’ve changed your outlook as to what part of the thing is important to you.

At least that’s what I tell myself when MS has me once again looking forward to something being over the way I once looked forward to it taking place.

It’s a never-ending process, but it’s the best I’ve come up with thus far.

Wishing you and your family the best of health.

Cheers,

Trevis