As I looked out of the window this morning at yet another spectacular sunrise in what has been (apart from a couple of cloudy mornings) just one long parade of such sunrises lately, if all very different in their colour palette and composition, I took a moment to appreciate that these spectacular skies had formed the backdrop to the month in which I had, finally, resumed my morning yoga and dance practice and, as a result, got back “into” my body (as somebody who often struggles to stay anywhere but my head…). The sheer variety of these mornings getting into my flow in a room lit up my the sun turning the sky radiant with colour has reminded me that a fresh start is always possible…and that there is no such thing as “normal” in nature.

Some backdrop to do my exercise to or, should I say, front drop as I have been doing my very best to take in every second of the experience, every day, like an affirmation to myself that life is all about the possibility of starting over…also, finding cause to celebrate diversity and variety as the very spice of life. After months in a cramped dark cottage where there wasn’t enough room to swing a cat let alone my arms, coming back to my morning practice has been powerfully positive for my mental as well as physical wellbeing and I know I won’t be letting that slip again. At the start of January, I was desperately out of condition, could hardly stand on one leg without a major wobble and had very little flexibility or stamina; in fact, it felt like I had lost everything I had spent years slowly and patiently building up in my chronically challenged body. Yet, a month later, I feel like I have more balance and stamina than I’ve had for a very long time…years…because my last two to three years were, in hindsight, a slippery slope of increased limitations and yet, now, I seem to have challenged that trajectory, but how? Its so easy to assume that chronic illness, or predispositions such as lax joints, will only ever get worse with the ageing process but there is so much more to it than that!

A big part of it, of course, is that we have been living in a favourite city and walking everywhere. Where we are renting is situated in a conservation area at the top of a steep hill with some further, pretty formidable, hills all around it so that, whenever we go for a walk or into town, there is simply no avoiding them. This would seem to be a terrible match with my painful, hypermobile joints and a tendency to crash into fatigue and dysautonomic episodes after the merest amount of overdoing it yet I have actually found that the impossibility of arguing with the fact of our hilly situation has pretty much forced me to take on what I might have otherwise gone out of my way to avoid. There was no other way around the conundrum: I simply had to get on and deal with it all…or sit here, in the flat, not going anywhere, which might have appeased my hypermobile body but wasn’t an option, at all, for my hypermobile mind which demands its daily dose of stimulation. Its been a classic case of carrot on a stick!

I’ve certainly had to get much smarter about moving and that part has proved interesting in that the use of more supports (to knees, lumbar and neck, pretty much every time I go out) has enabled me to manage far more walking than for a very long time, also enabling me to relearn how to walk with far better posture than the various distortions my rolling gait had previously allowed me to fall into the bad habit of. Its amazing how properly positioned knee joints, for instance, can have such majorly positive repercussions when it comes to the hips, ankles, spine, in fact the whole rest of the body (all of which had been overcompensating for my laxity in that department for a very long time, with a domino effect of other symptoms and much increased fatigue from all the efforts involved in moving or being upright). The result is that my knee joints feel far less like they are bone rubbing on bone as I walk and and, also, that I have more stamina because I am not having to utilise all my energy compensating for poor posture, or correcting every sideways consequence of laxity (from joints that bend in directions that they shouldn’t), as I move along. Instead, I can focus my efforts on, simply, moving forwards!

With so much going on within walking distance (and the big part of me that demands to be stimulated has utterly relished these opportunities) we’ve been walking into town such a lot, not least so many evenings in pursuit of live music performances, cinema or meals out. There have been so many days, or should I say nights, when I’ve been pulling on my boots at around the same time that I used to pull on my pyjamas and that’s been a big change. It could have been so easily argued, 18 months ago, that my precarious state of health was in no position to be put through the experience of relocating so very far, with so much uncertainty and upheaval, not to mention living in various temporary accommodations and having to shift all our stuff several times since the middle of last summer and yet the very opposite has been true…moving has actually reinvigorated my life. It’s focused me on other things aside from my old-stuck routine, reminding me about things I used to love to do (and that they still exist out there) and allowed me to feel like I am entitled to go after the kind of life that I really want, just as much as the next person.

The biggest part is that I’ve got back my joie de vivre…and, along with that, my spontaneity, my confidence, my best effort (pre-illness) social skills, a less environmentally sensitised (over-reactive!) nervous system from increased exposure to a broader variety of situations, my trust that things will all turn out and my belief that its all worth giving it a shot!

Of course, I will always be hypermobile (and middle age really hasn’t been kind to that; I’ve had to learn how to handle a very different body, pretty quickly, over the last decade or so) and there have been countless phases of increased pain, even POTs, these last few weeks, sometimes prompted by that old foe “overdoing things”, but then there have also been the better times, when I’m left clocking just how much I can now do and just how well my body is taking it, overall…which is far better than how it was coping a short month or two ago. The way I “truck” up the big hill to our flat, now, is quite different to how I would try to manage it, stopping and starting to grimace through the pain or get back my breath, when we first moved here in mid-December, so my morning routine isn’t the only thing to have vastly improved. All of this, in spite of having covid (which I had always feared might wipe the floor with me) just over a month ago. I am most certainly stronger and fitter than I was back then and probably have more resilience and core strength than I have had for the best part of half a decade because all the daily movement, with resistance, has steadily built up its positive effects. Its as though gravity and I are on much better terms again!

I still have to deal with my “stuff” in ways that anyone outside of my body would find hard to understand or relate to but I handle it better than I used to and don’t dwell on the factor of “needing them to relate” so that I can feel seen. I would much rather they saw the results of my best efforts to get on with things, which is not to say I am masking (I have got a whole lot better at asking for accommodations or just saying it like it is when I simply can’t do something) but a case of not wanting to make chronic-ness the focal point of my existence for myself or anyone around me. I would much rather they see me than “it” when we meet up and this makes meeting others feel far less daunting than it used to when I used to feel that I could never intersect my experiences with theirs without them knowing everything about what I was dealing with. I’ve come to better appreciate that we all have “our stuff” but that we don’t always have to throw it on the table and stare at it; that its often more life-affirming to focus on the better stuff.

I’ve also got much better at tailoring what I do to what I can realistically do without dire consequence and not some ideal in my head. At the ripe old age of 55 I’ve finally learned that just because I “can” do something doesn’t always mean I “should” do it and that includes spinning my arms around like a windmill when I dance (not quite that…but I have always liked to give it my all with my hypermobile limbs). Just by keeping my arms more controlled, a little closer to my chest (and this could so easily be a metaphor for many other factors of my life…) I’m able to enjoy the dance without suffering the cascade of unwanted effects when my hypermobile joints become too lax or spasm back into constriction, complete with trapped nerves, sending everything else into pain and disarray. This way of thinking, and behaving, is so much more sustainable and leads to some far bigger wins along the way!

In fact, all of these things have been my recent wins and it’s just so important to notice and appreciate them…as I highly recommend you do with your own, as often as possible. Once you become fixated on “chronic, its all too easy to focus on all the negatives, the impossibilities, the compromises, the life-time-long limited factors that can never be overcome but, when we do that, we lose the open mindset that it takes to register the improvements, the small and medium-sized wins, the subtle yet indisputable hints that we are actually moving forwards…making our own fresh start every day…not towards “normal” (whatever that is…) but towards our own personal best.