Guest post from Karyn: A Gift for You

A gift for you for International ME/CFS Awareness Day.

I know Awareness Day can be quite an emotional day for sufferers, so I’d like to offer everyone a small gift. It’s an unusual gift – so bear with me. It’s a piece of fishing line.

In the book “Operating Instructions” Anne Lamott tells a story about some autistic children who were so severely withdrawn that if you stood them up, they’d just fall over. But the people working with them discovered that if they ran a rope from one end of the room to the other and stood the kids up, holding on to the rope, they could walk across to the other side of the room. Over a period of time they gradually put up thinner and thinner pieces of rope, then string, then eventually some fine, almost invisible, fishing line. And the kids could still walk across the room as long as they were holding on to it.

But then (and this is what blows my mind about the story) the adults cut the fishing line into small pieces, and handed a piece to each child. And still the autistic children could get themselves across the room!

And so I want to give each of you a tiny piece of fishing line. So that you may have faith that, no matter how impossible the task seems, you can believe that one day we will all get to the other side of these diseases, have our independence back, and our lives back. As you hold that fishing line I want you also to know that it is a symbol of our connectedness to each other. We each hold a piece of that fishing line, we understand each other’s suffering, and we are all here for each other. I hope and pray that that little piece of fishing line can be your guidance, your support, your safety net, your strength, and your way forward. Love you all.

by Karyn Crimmin

Written for #May12th Awareness Day &  #May12BlogBomb#May12BlogBomb List of Links for 2015