The Day I Got My Vision Back

I find it weird how you can get to a point in life and have no idea how you got there. I was an honor student in high school. I was pretty. I was athletic. I was popular. I was going places. I was that girl. Two years later I was going to University. I wanted something from life – I expected something from life, but I didn’t know what. The girl who had always been out having fun, doing things, living life effortlessly, was gone. I had lost interest in the people who I had valued so much before. They had vanished and suddenly I didn’t like where I was. I knew I was unsatisfied, but I just assumed this was my life so I trudged on.

It was my third year of University when I started experiencing physical symptoms. My vision became blurred. I was tired all the time and soon I wasn’t able to exert myself physically. I stopped working out and lost weight. I was deflating. Soon I couldn’t get through the day without sleeping. Everything was an effort. I couldn’t fake it anymore.

I went to the doctor more than ten times over a two month span and saw a number of specialists, all who couldn’t find any medical explanation for my physical symptoms. I resented them. I knew they thought it was in my head.

Eventually tired of getting no answers, I went to a naturopath who confirmed that the “balance in my body was way off” and gave me herbs for a number of problems (like low blood pressure), but couldn’t determine any overall cause. At first I thought the herbs were helping, but very quickly I fell right back to my original state. I felt hopeless and finally gave in completely to my fatigue, resigning myself to endless hours in bed. I felt lifeless. I felt dead.

I went back to the naturopath and broke down in her office. I told her that I thought she was just treating the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. She assured me that this was not the case: That I had to be the one to change this. That I had to “imagine the life I wanted and then create that life for myself”. She gave me more herbs and more advice of how I could will my body out of its state, but it was her words that did the willing instead.

I went away at first with more frustration. She didn’t understand. I couldn’t just make these symptoms go away. I went home and went back to bed, but her words stayed with me. I couldn’t ignore the idea that if I could think of a better life for myself, I could have it. I started trying to sleep less. I set an alarm and slowly cut down the time. I started asking myself: “what do I want my life to look like?” Surprisingly it didn’t take long for me to get a clear vision in my head and knowing what I wanted for my future made it very clear to me what was lacking in my present. As I became more determined to live the life I wanted for myself, the less of a hold my physical symptoms had on me.

Now, almost a year later, my life is very different then it was when I visited the naturopath. I don’t sleep through the day, I have energy to do the things I want to do, I see the people who are important to me regularly, and I am once again doing the things I am passionate about. My vision is still blurry at times, but it doesn’t consume my life the way it did because now I have a different kind of vision – a vision for life.