Many MSers will painfully admit they had amazing and empowering dreams or life goals to reach prior to MS diagnosis. What is even painful, is giving up on those life goals and plans, but then some might say: do we have a choice anyway?
I used to think so, facing this sudden intruder in my life wasn’t as pragmatic as I would like. In addition to the chocking news, I’m conscious that my defensive personal traits, have a major factor in the way I dealt with MS, especially the first years. Till now, I still get those breakdown moments where everything seems to crumble down around and with me.
…life wouldn’t be fun without challenges.
That said, even though I feel like l missed or wasted a lot of years, lamenting and complaining about what MS held me from reaching. My vision gradually changed or evolved from succumbing to MS unpreventable and surprising outcomes, to managing and adapting those outcomes and using them as changing and motivating element. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be fun without challenges.
Instead of surrendering to those sad feelings triggered by my past goals and life plans, I learned to not only reevaluate my priorities in accordance with my assets, but also to incrementally develop my skillets by taking small actions and short-term plans.
In the end, I was as lost as I was the first day…
One of the issues I had to deal with was to make the right choice for the next step, on a personal and professional level. That’s how, I spent most of my time continuously brainstorming about either learning to use a 3D Software (Blender), Digital Marketing or User Experience (UX).
I used to dive in these 3 fields, learning from different sources, at different paces. In the end, I was as lost as I was the first day, if not even more. But feeling like I was running out of time, made me plan unpleasant schedule to learn as much as possible, in a short period. Then… I gave up, deliberately!
Why don’t you take small steps to reach your goals?
I had a nice discussion with my MS buddy, Asmae, after one of my MS rants, and she knew, with simple words how to liberate me from the staling state I was in. She said: Why don’t you take small steps to reach your goals?
And that’s what I’m trying to do in the last months, and it works quite well. For example, instead of learning about 3 fields in parallel, I decided to dedicate enough time to learn each one separately, one by one, which helped me build an opinion about that subject, reevaluate my interests and the future applications on a professional level of the newly acquired knowledge.
At this point, I decided to focus primary on studying and learning about User Experience (UX) and to postpone learning about other subjects, and I can already appreciate my dedication and time management, compared to my messy schedule.
It’s a small step, but a good example that I’ll try to replicate on other aspects of my life in general, success is not guaranteed but isn’t worth the effort?
Originally published at https://mstroll.com on May 16, 2021.
