I was a rock-climber, a musician, a martial artist, and a professional juggler in a circus. After a 25-foot fall on my back during a circus rehearsal, I began to have many strange symptoms which were eventually diagnosed as ME\/CFS.<\/p>\n
I work from home in IT (information technology) these days. Flu-like pain is nearly continuous. There is a sense of uncomfortable pressure in my head most of the time, too. I usually I can’t go out to do much, because the sense of being crushed by an immense weight of exhaustion is too much for me.<\/p>\n
Buddhist meditation is my main life-line, along with guitar, piano and singing. I have to focus on what is positive so that I don’t panic and fall into despair. It is a terribly lonesome road, with constant sickness, pain and exhaustion.
\nI long for the sun of vitality to come back one day so that I can make a full contribution in this life. Sometimes, I feel like I have become impossibly ancient, like about 600 years old. Imagining all the people suffering even worse than I do helps me feel compassion rather than fear. Fear by itself is just horrible, but compassion can be really beautiful. We can sing in our chains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humans of ME\/CFS I was a rock-climber, a musician, a martial artist, and a professional juggler in a circus. After a 25-foot fall on my back during a circus rehearsal, I began to have many strange symptoms which were eventually diagnosed as ME\/CFS. I work from home in IT (information technology) these days. Flu-like pain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":609,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/hugh_c.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}