Happy Monday & welcome to week 11 of the Live Brave Series!!! If you haven’t had a chance to read the previous posts – I would highly recommend it!  You will be encouraged, inspired & blessed!

Excited to introduce you today to Alexa!! Thankful for her willingness to share her story! We find so much freedom in owning & embracing our story!!

My name is Alexa and my story of living brave is LIVING with Chronic Pain. The older I get the deeper meaning those old sayings have; “Don’t jude a book by its cover,” “If you have health you have everything.” Well that couldn’t be more true for me!

Chronic pain is defined as pain in any part of the body that has lasted 3 months or longer. I’ve been living with Chronic Pain for 14 years. I have Chronic Pain from an old back injury, Fibromyalgia (http://www.fmaware.org), and Lyme Disease (http://www.ilads.org). Most of the time I feel like I have the flu – achy and sore – something I can ignore but it always there on some level. Those are my good days. On my bad days my pain flares – increases exponentially – making everyday simple tasks seem overwhelmingly difficult. These pain flares usually last somewhere between 4 days to 2 weeks at a time. This pain has taught me so many valuable life lessons and has given me deeper relationship with God.

In my journey I have learned to really LIVE life and appreciate what I have today, in this moment! I’m not claiming to be perfect at living in the moment every day but I do my best. I’ve learned that life is more of an “AND” statement rather than an “OR” statement. For example I have pain AND I enjoy my life as opposed to I can either have pain OR enjoy my life. I accept where I am on life’s path AND I keep looking for solutions to my pain. I have fear, frustration AND I have faith with hope.

I’ve lost a lot of friends a long the way who just couldn’t understand what I was going through and thought that I was just whining and complaining all the time. I must have seemed no fun to them because I couldn’t do the things everyone else was doing like go dancing all night, go on long car trips, go hiking, etc. AND it is also true that those who have stood by me are exceptionally special to me and my greatest blessing. But I’d say the hardest thing I’ve had to overcome is doctors telling me that there is “nothing wrong” when I knew that there was, or that it was “all in my head.” The good doctors will tell you when they don’t know something AND still try to help you find the answers. The bad doctors dismiss your symptoms because they don’t fit into a certain diagnosis and instead of admitting that they don’t know what’s wrong, they make you feel like it’s your fault you are sick. It took me a long time, over 12 years, to find the right combination of doctors, but I am so grateful that I have found them.

Before I was officially diagnosed with Lyme Disease I was very sick but didn’t understand why. My Mother-In-Law gave me a book called “The Purpose Driven Life” and it really changed the way I looked at my pain. I started to think “What’s the purpose of this pain? What lesson does God want me to learn from it?” And that was life changing for me. I started thinking of all the people God had brought into my life who suffered from chronic pain, through injury or illness. And I started thinking about how lucky I was to have these people as a support system. Then I realized that most people with chronic pain probably feel really alone and might not know another person in a similar situation. And I saw that of all the people I knew who lived in chronic pain, I seemed to have an easier time than most sharing my personal story with other people. I decided that my purpose was to share the knowledge I had learned over the years. So I started writing a book about chronic pain not only from my perspective but from the perspective of other people in pain AND from those that love them, because our loved ones walk down this journey with us and their stories are just as important. This has been one of the most important projects of my life because my goal is to help give a voice to others in pain.

While writing my book I’ve talked to many people in pain from all different sources. Here’s what I’ve learned – it doesn’t matter where your pain comes from – all pain is pain – but you have to find a way to LIVE. You have to learn to separate who you are as a person from your pain. There is a reason they say “mind, body, soul.” You are your soul, your body is where you have to live but it doesn’t make you who you are. Yes, it shapes who you are, affects what you can do, but YOU are your soul, not the sum of your pain. When the pain was new to me, I was determined to find answers about why I was in pain all the time. But finding the answers didn’t always mean there was a solution. So now I focus on ways to accept that the pain may never go away, and focus on how I want to live the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still fighting for better health, going to doctors’ appointments, taking medications, and searching for new ideas on how to be in less pain, but I’m also making sure that I’m LIVING life as well. At the end of the day I want to be remembered as “Alexa” and not “that girl in pain.” I want to be seen as a person who is strong, compassionate, and someone who left the world in a better place than I found it. I want my son to grow up knowing his Mom lived life to the fullest and didn’t let pain limit her joy in life.

On this journey I’ve become stronger in my faith and have a deeper understanding of Jesus’s love for us all. I’ve learned the power of prayer – not just for the one you pray for but for yourself; for when you take the time to remember others it helps you pull out of the narrowed focus that pain puts around you. I’ve learned to cherish the “good days” more and more because we don’t know how many of them we will get, but hope of more “good days to come” get me through the “bad days.” I’ve learned how to be more open to new things and more understanding of other people’s limitations. And I think most of all I’ve learned that everyone “has a cross to bear;” that everyone has had something in their lives that they have had to over come, which has profoundly affected them in their past and possibly their present.

Everyone is walking around carrying something and I really believe in my heart that we were all given these things for a reason, for a purpose. The trick to life is figuring out what to do with it. Instead of “why did this happen to me?” I try to think “what can I do with this?” And for me, that change in the way I think has vastly improved my life. You may not always understand why “bad things happen to good people” but I have a feeling it’s to help us all have more compassion for the person sitting next to us. Often time the hardest things in life are the thing that made us grow the most as people. So even though I wish I could find a magic solution to take all this pain away, I can’t regret it because it’s made me the person I am today. It has shaped my life, given me a greater understanding of others, and brought me a stronger faith which is now the foundation of my life.