Getting out of bed

Aug 11, 2018

3 min read

Ran across this quote today. It’s so powerful to me. As someone who went through cancer I remember the days when I couldn’t get out of bed. If I did, it was to use the bathroom. It was a rough time. Five months of chemotherapy. Not an easy journey let me tell you. But each new day was a new day to be grateful for. A day I gave thanks to God for.

Here I am over six years later. And every day I think about staying in the bed. I think about not going to work. For maybe a second. Then I’m reminded of how much I yearned to go back to work when I was battling cancer. I remember telling my mom that I will work and work overtime if needed. I couldn’t wait to get back to some form of normal. And so, because of those memories I practically jump out of the bed. Praising God for the ability to do so.

Does that make me brave? No. It just makes me grateful. I don’t feel I was brave when I was sick either. People saw it as brave. Fighting cancer was just that…fighting. I may have had a choice, to fight or to just let it be, but I didn’t see it as brave. It was just living. I wanted to keep living. I believed that if it was my time to go I’d give it everything I had. And if after everything I had was exhausted and I died then it was simply meant to be.

That’s not brave, to me, that’s just life.

All of that said, maybe there is braveNESS (not a word I know) in choosing to get out of the bed every day. Especially for those that deal with mental illness. Maybe for those that (physically) hurt so badly that it may be easier to stay in bed, yet they get out of it anyway.

There are illnesses out there I have NO clue about. Illnesses that may not kill people like cancer can and does, but is just as debilitating. Just as painful. Just as ugly. Just as frightening, as cancer.

To those fighting such illnesses it is work just to get out of bed. But they do and I think that is brave.

Maybe brave is not what we see about ourselves, but rather how we see others. How we see others strong in ways we could maybe never see ourselves be.

I guess that is why when people called me brave I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t want to be seen as someone better than anyone else. After all we don’t know how strong we are until we are in the moment of having no other choice but to be strong.

I don’t know really. Is it strength? Is it bravery? Or is is merely survival? Maybe it’s all of them. Or tools needed to survive. Whether we see it that way or not. The fight or flight thing you know?!

I do know that getting out of bed is a big deal. Because after getting out of bed many things come next. Dealing with things that aren’t easy. Of the physical or mental realm, which could be things that make us want to get back into that bed. And yet we keep pushing through it all. We stay the course. We move forward. Knowing there’s no guarantee that life will ever be the same or easy. But knowing more can be done out of the bed than in it.

Here’s to all those that though it’s hard getting out of bed DO IT ANYWAY. You’re amazing! Never forget that! ❤