Rome wasn't built in a day: Learning to be patient

I sometimes wonder if God gave me CFS/ME to teach me to be patient. I don’t want to get into a philosophical discussion about fate and God, I want to talk about learning to be patient, but I really do wonder about this occasionally. It would be nice to think getting CFS/ME had some sort of purpose.

I am not a patient person. I think I may once have had more patience, but somewhere over the years I lost it all. I can be very patient with other people, especially if I think they need my time and help. But in other circumstances not so much. Slow drivers in particular wind me up. I still behave and drive well, but inside I seethe with impatience if forced to follow someone doing 40 in a 60mph zone. With myself I have no patience at all. In the past if I was ill I would be out the door doing things as soon as I felt a tiny bit better, and then exhausting myself, from trying to do too much too soon. This is somewhat ironic given my current situation.

CFS/ME has to be the greatest teacher of patience I have come across. Recovery is imperceptibly slow. Months go by with no noticeable improvement. It’s only looking back over six months or a year that it is possible to see positive change. Not only that, but you must limit the things you want and need to do. You may really want to go shopping, but today you cleaned the bathroom, so shopping must wait until tomorrow. You may have done too much and overspent on your energy budget and you want to go out for a meal. But that must wait for a few days until you recover the energy to enjoy it and not use more energy than you have. In some ways this is easy, the planning side of me can say ‘Well, today you are doing such and such, so tomorrow is rest day, then the day after you can do...’ and so on. But actually sitting there in the moment, wanting to do something, but knowing it would be foolish is very difficult. For spontaneous people it must be horrible. You can no longer say ‘Let's go out today,’ instead you say ‘Let's go out tomorrow, if I’m feeling better’.

Time passes and you feel you have little to show for it. As much as you rage at the delay nothing changes it. If you give in to impatience and do it now, you will just pay the price tomorrow. If you wait and do it tomorrow when you have more energy, the following day there will hopefully be no price to pay. And if you rage away angrily to yourself, impatient to be up and out and doing, then you are wasting your precious energy. All those angry and frustrated thoughts cost. To the average person they probably don’t cost much, but when you have CFS/ME all your thoughts and emotions cost you energy, that you can’t afford to waste. 

So the answer is to be patient, to learn to not rage and fight your constraints, but to calmly accept that whatever it is must wait. I am learning... slowly. It is not an easy thing learning to be patient. 

‘We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.’ - Helen Keller