Last summer, I was trying to get through the days. This summer, I got to live them.

I got to be with my family. I got to see my friends. I got to show up for the people I love again, not perfectly, not with endless energy, but I showed up.

Last summer, I was sick. I was exhausted, and I was scared. My body didn’t feel like mine, and neither did my life.

At some point during the summer, I spoke with someone who had also been very sick with Lyme. She said something to me that I remember so clearly:

I know it’s hard to believe this right now, but you will get through this. And when you come out of it, you will be healthier and more connected to yourself than you have ever been.

Of course, I wanted to believe her, but at the time, it felt like a very far stretch from my reality. When you’re struggling to walk steadily or keep your eyes open, becoming someone wiser, healthier, more connected version of yourself isn’t exactly what you’re thinking about.

You just want to feel healthy again.

You want your life back.

And this summer, little by little, I got pieces of mine back.

I could make plans again. I could laugh and stay out and enjoy myself without constantly wondering how much my body would make me pay for it afterward.

I could be more present with my daughter and husband. I walked my dogs without worrying that my foot would go numb and took care of our home again.

I started regaining the confidence to show up for my life again.

There is something incredibly humbling about not feeling healthy enough to really participate in your life. And then to feel like you are slowly reentering the lives of the people you love instead of watching from the sidelines of your own.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time this summer organizing. Closets. Drawers. Rooms. Bills. My devices. Piles of things I hadn’t dealt with. All the little pieces of life that had accumulated while I was sick, and I simply didn’t have the capacity to care about them.

In some ways, I think I was trying to catch up on lost time. But I think I was also reclaiming a little bit of control over my life. After spending so much time in a body that felt unpredictable, unable to do so many of the things I wanted to do, there was something strangely satisfying about putting my physical world back in order.

I couldn’t control everything that had happened to me or what my body would do next, but I could clean out a damn closet. Ha! I’ve always been really good at that!

But unsurprisingly, there were days I pushed too hard. Old habits don’t disappear …Sometimes we have to catch ourselves falling back into them over and over again before something new starts to feel natural.

I think that was part of my healing, too.

Because instead of shaming myself when I overdid it, I started practicing something different.

Grace.

Okay. You did too much today. You’re excited to feel good. You’re allowed to be excited about your life.

But now your body needs you to rest.

So rest.

This might sound small, but for me it wasn’t. Somewhere along the way, I had learned to make not feeling good mean something about me. If I were exhausted, I should have more energy. If my body couldn’t do what I wanted it to do, I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong. If everyone else seemed capable of keeping up and I couldn’t, there was this quiet voice wondering why I couldn’t just get it together.

Even when I got Covid or the flu, I could somehow blame myself.

I grew up with a mom who was very sick. I watched illness take so much from her and from the life she wanted to have. I think somewhere along the way, I unconsciously decided I would do everything I could to not let that happen to me.

So when my own body stopped cooperating, it wasn’t just frustrating. It touched something much deeper in me. I wasn’t supposed to be sick. I didn’t want to be the mom or the wife always in bed. I didn’t want to be the woman who was too stressed to handle her life.

I didn’t want my life to become smaller because of my body.

Somewhere along the way, I started to believe that if I took good enough care of myself, worked hard enough, and did all the “right” things, I could somehow guarantee that my life wouldn’t get smaller.

Last summer forced me to confront all of that.

I started to understand that my body struggling wasn’t a personal failure. I wasn’t sick because I wasn’t strong enough or good enough. I wasn’t exhausted because I couldn’t keep up.

I didn’t mean I needed more discipline.

I needed care. I needed compassion.

I needed to finally, for once in my life, give myself a break.

There is a sweetness, but also a sadness, in realizing that I’m still learning how to love myself when I’m not okay. To give myself true unconditional love.

I’m also learning how to let myself be okay when I am okay. To feel good without immediately turning that energy into productivity. To stop trying to make up for every lost day. To enjoy having pieces of my life back without feeling like I need to be productive before I am allowed to enjoy them.

I am allowed to enjoy my life.

That sounds like such a simple sentence.

But it hasn’t always been for me.

I’ve been through a lot in my life. I’ve lost both of my parents. I’ve lost three of my siblings. I’ve experienced the loss of unborn babies. There have been other painful, complicated things along the way.

I know grief.

And yet, for some reason, last summer changed me in a way I can’t completely explain.

I’ve thought about why …Maybe it’s because it happened as I was moving through midlife and menopause, a time when something in me already felt like it was waking up. Like I was beginning to see my life, my body, my relationships, and myself differently.

Maybe being that sick was simply the cherry on top of a lifetime of hard things, and something in me finally said, enough.

Or maybe it’s because, quite literally, there were moments when I was afraid I might die.

I was scared. Really scared.

When my feet were numb, my balance was unsteady, my brain wasn’t working the way it normally did, and I could barely keep my eyes open, I didn’t know what was happening to my body or where it was going to end.

Maybe coming that close to the fear of losing your life changes the way you want to live it.

Or maybe I don’t even need to know exactly why.

I just know something shifted.

Last summer stripped away the illusion that I have endless time. But it also stripped away something else: this idea that if I could just figure it out, I could always control how I felt.

I had started to confuse caring for my body with being completely responsible for everything that was happening to it.

We can care for ourselves deeply and still get sick. We can do everything “right” and still wake up feeling terrible. Hormones fluctuate. Bodies change. Illness happens. Grief happens. Aging happens. Life happens.

Not everything happening inside my body is something I caused, and not every uncomfortable feeling is evidence that I’ve done something wrong.

I’m still learning that.

For so much of my life, when something hurt, my instinct was to ask:

What do I need to do to fix this?

I’m learning there is another question:

What do I need right now?

One begins with the assumption that I have done something wrong. The other begins with care.

And this summer, as I slowly got more of that life back, I think that’s what I understood differently.

But not intellectually …in my bones.

Maybe that is what the woman who had Lyme that I spoke to last summer meant when she said I would come out of this more connected to myself.

Not that illness would somehow make everything better. I don’t believe we need to romanticize suffering to find meaning in what it teaches us. I would have preferred not to get that sick.

But I did.

And maybe the biggest thing that changed is that I don’t want to spend the life I got back trying to control it.

I want to live it.