Today I wanted to share a post with you on a time where I had to overcome a daunting challenge! There have been many of those over the years. However I wanted to keep things related to being diagnosed with CRPS seeing as this is a blog about living my chronic life! There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of those either. To pick just one is really hard because they’ve all been hard to get through. There have been financial, physical, and mental challenges of all types just trying to get through every day that you have to live with this illness called CRPS. If I had to pick just one I’d have to say that losing confidence in myself would have to rank up there as a top contender.

I mentioned this in yesterday’s post and today I’ll get into it in a bit more detail. When everything starting happening to me back in 2006 my world started to get flipped upside down. It was hard enough having to deal with the physical limitations that were happening to me but the mental side of the illness just added that extra little bit to push things over the top. It’s hard to explain but it was as if my brain was spinning out of control. I was now on a totally different playing field and I just didn’t know if I could play the full game that I had to play. With everything that I had to overcome and the other challenges down the road that I knew I was going to have to meet seemed next to impossible and I found my confidence at an all time low.

There were so many new ways that I was going to have to adapt not only physically but mentally in how I approached everything. Looking at this today the physical side of things was the easier of the two because without confidence the mental side of things was that much harder. All of a sudden I had to learn this whole new world of how to do things and that was scary for me. Not to mention the pain that I now had to deal with. In my mind all I could think about was how in the world was I going to climb this mountain that now looked impossible to climb. It was a matter of leaning on my faith at trusting that I could take baby steps to gain that confidence back. Let me assure you that there were days where I never thought that it was going to happen.

This wasn’t a process that happened overnight! It takes time, patience, and energy that you don’t always have to gain your confidence back. I’m not going to put a time frame on it because everyones situation is different. The point is that you can regain that confidence and to work at it slowly. It might seem at times like your never going to get it back but it will come, and as you work at it and gain bits and pieces back you begin to see that it might actually happen. I’ve had CRPS now for just over nine years and just now am I starting to feel good about where my confidence level is at. As you grow into and adapt to your disability, you become more confident with your abilities.

So my advice to you is this! You might feel like the daunting challenge is to much to handle or get through but push on and do the hard work to get yourself there because you can do it!