Mr E's beautiful blues

A friend of mine has recently had to make a difficult decision.

We seem to be at the age now where our lives are full of them. Or maybe our lives have always been full of them – after all, who’s to say that the choice between the swings or the slide wasn’t just as difficult as the choice between renting or buying, children or career, staying or going – it’s just different frames of reference.

But during their decision-making process I received a text saying they’d felt resigned to the situation they had chosen - and it made me wonder (over-think) about the word they’d used.

People quite often say they’re resigned to something – fate, situations, having to take part in an office away day - I’m pretty sure I’ve said it myself. But exactly how resigned am I to having MS? And if I’m not resigned, what else might I be?

Resignation, based on my very limited pop-psychology reading, implies giving up because you've decided that there is nothing you can do about your situation.

It’s seen as a passive state of being with underlying sadness, disappointment and fear of the future.

A horrible way to feel. But not wholly unfamiliar.

Further reading tells me that the flipside of resignation is acceptance – not that you’re happy with what’s happened, not that you wanted it to happen, not that you don’t wish it hadn’t happened, but simply that you're able to acknowledge that it has happened. It is what it is.

Acceptance isn't easy. It asks you to let go of how you think things should be or how you wish they were, and to work wisely and effectively with your reality, especially when you don't like it.

The suggestion being that once you give up the resistance and denial, you can take the energy you were spending on struggling and use it to decide how to respond or what to do next. In other words, acceptance opens up choice.

Now I didn’t have a choice in developing MS, it careered rudely into my life and there was nothing I could do about it.

The only choice I had – and it’s turned out to be a huge one – was the way in which I chose and keep choosing to deal with it within the realistic parameters of what this disease does to you.

So I chose to tell people – my friends, my work, random strangers, I chose to have a child knowing it wouldn’t be easy, I chose not to - and then to - take medication, I chose to laugh at myself, be honest, write this blog and I constantly choose to push my luck.

But despite consciously making these choices, I’m still not sure how much of my MS I am resigned to and how much of it I accept.

I’m not even sure if I’m accepting of my resignation to it, or if I’m resigned to my acceptance of it.

Or, on the evidence of that last sentence, if I’ve suddenly turned into Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

I'm not sure I know what I think. Perhaps it’s time for a bit of honest reflection in the looking glass.

:: Mr E’s beautiful blues by Eels

*For what it’s worth, I think my friend has made the right decision and I really hope they find acceptance. They deserve it.

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