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Blindsided

I started and finished a book this weekend. I love when that happens. There's something intensely satisfying about immersing yourself in a story like that. This weekend, it was Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, a memoir by Richard Cohen.

One scene caused Cohen to explain that he found encouragement through hearing about or meeting people who were sicker than he was. Poetic, then, that this is exactly what his memoir did for me. Cohen has lived thirty years with the effects of MS and his honesty in the book is amazing - the way he describes what it's like to live both realistically and optimistically with an unpredictable chronic disease.

A few sentences really resonated with me:
"The psychological war with illness is fought on two fronts, on the battlefield of the mind and in the depths of the heart. Emotional strength must be learned. I am a better person for that struggle. Attitude is a weapon of choice, endlessly worked... Self-pity is a poison. There is no time. I need a future and refuse to become a victim. Too often we become oblivious to our own prisons, taking the bars and high walls for granted. Sometimes we construct them ourselves, and the barbed wire goes up even higher. Too many of the limitations placed on us are an extension of our own timidity."

If anyone feels like they'd do well to walk in another's shoes for a few hours, I'm officially recommending this book :)

L

posted by Lindsay @ 5:03 PM