The Blame Game

Someone said something that brought me down the other day. That's easy to do, don't get me wrong. While I might be feeling better in some ways, my appointment in February wasn't the golden ticket I hoped it would be and needless to say, I'm still mentally fragile. So when someone close to me said I wasn't doing good enough, it hit hard.

I'm doing my best, and for the four years I've felt like shit, I've been doing my best. Sometimes my best was just getting out of bed and taking a shower. Sometimes my best was getting a solid day's writing in. Some days my best was just going to the store, making sure my kids had food, and dropping into bed for the rest of the day. 

People like to judge you, and since I've been sick, I haven't been a stranger to it. The incredulous part is, the people who judge you have no right. I mean, no one does, but if you really look at people who do the judging, they don't have perfect lives either. They take their health for granted, or they look down on your hobbies or passions because they don't have any of their own. I'm not going to identify who told me I wasn't doing good enough because he might stumble upon this post at some point, and I don't want to cause friction where there already is some. But suffice to say, he's not living a perfect life. He's arrogant in his health, but he shouldn't be. Sickness and illness, both mental and physical, can come out of nowhere, so he might be healthy now, but who knows what could happen. He's not doing much with his life either, working a job that he tolerates and not much else. I don't know why he thinks his life and the way he lives it gives him permission to judge everyone else, but all I see is an unhappy man who has to put others down to feel better about himself. 

Victim shaming isn't new. Rape victims are asked what they were wearing and why they were alone at night. People who are overweight are blamed for eating, people who are hurt in car accidents are blamed for not driving more carefully. The list goes on, and I've been blamed for using dryer sheets in the first place, never mind that millions of people use dryer sheets and fabric softeners every day without incident. Believe me, if I could go back four years, I never would have thrown that box of S****le into my cart. It ruined my life. I don't even want to think about what my life could have been like if I had been healthy. I lost four years and I'll never get them back. 

It doesn't help that during these four years I've felt like crap, I've tried to get better. When I scheduled my appointment at the Mayo Clinic, I downloaded my medical records in case she needed them (she didn't--she had access through a medical portal online), and I saw that in the four years I've had this condition that I went to the doctor twenty-two times. I tried, goddamn it, to feel better and it's not my fault the doctors here didn't know what was wrong. When people say you're not doing good enough, they're invalidating everything you've tried to do and are doing to feel better and that's not fair. I have tried fucking hard to get well, and every time a doctor swabbed me for bacterial vaginosis and a yeast infection I knew I didn't have, it broke me down just a little bit more. Being told, "I don't know what's wrong with you" is almost as bad as having the condition in the first place because you really start to think that's the way you're going to feel forever and ever. 

I think a lot of the issue is sick people are perceived as weak. We saw that a lot during COVID. People bragging they hadn't caught it because their immune systems were strong enough to fight it off, or people who caught "mild cases" and were lauded as healthy people who weren't drastically affected. People who are sick are a drain on the medical system and aren't productive members of society. We shouldn't have to accommodate for sick people because it's their fault they're sick in the first place. We're an ableist society, and if you're not healthy, slim, and pretty, you're fucking no one, or worse than no one. But it's the same as being poor. You can't be poor and thought of as anything but useless and a waste of space. It's brutal out there, and people who are disabled or have a chronic illness know that. 

I'm lucky and I have a friend or two who understands what it's like not to feel good. We don't tell each other we're not doing our best because we know our best is going to vary from day to day, maybe even hour by hour. 

The fact is, you're not going to please everyone. Even if I were healthy and feeling great, my choices would make others unhappy. Where I live, the job I work, that I had kids, the vehicle I drive, whatever. People love to tear others down to lift themselves up and at that point, it has nothing to do with you, even though, because you feel like crap and take everything way more personally, it will feel like it does. 

What this person said to me will stick with me for a while. It was hurtful, and no one knows better than me what's good enough and what isn't. I have a follow-up appointment on Tuesday, the 28th, and maybe I'll get more answers then. I'll never completely have my life back. Lichen sclerosus doesn't have a cure--only a treatment. Whatever is bothering me in my belly now, under my belly button and into my pelvis, is more than likely a side effect from my hysterectomy surgery. I don't want to speculate or guess, but even if somehow those feelings can be alleviated, I'll always have the lichen, and honestly, I'll probably always have a mental health issue because of all this. I'm never going to get "back to normal," and my best is going to be unbalanced possibly for the rest of my life. 

While I was sick and searching for answers, I was a mom to my kids, wrote more than 11 books (find the published ones at www.vmrheault.com) kept my day job, kept a roof over our heads and food in the fridge. If that's not someone's best, fuck them. It's my best, and that's all that matters.

Everyone who plays the blame game loses in some way.

But it's a game I don't want to win.