Friday, May 12, 2017

Why am I still pushing awareness?

Anyone who knows me, and has known me for a while, knows a lot about fibromyalgia at this point.  Because of this, I've had people ask me "why do you still push awareness?  Everyone already knows."  But they don't.  It's become so normalized in the lives of people close to me, that they forget that this isn't the case for a large portion of people.  I push awareness because people with chronic pain are still believed to be 50% more likely to commit suicide than the general population.  I push awareness because I still meet people ALL THE TIME who hear me mention it, see it written on my t-shirt, etc. and look like they've just heard a foreign word, and they ask me what it means.  I push awareness because there are still people out there, men and women, children even, who feel like they have nobody to talk to because nobody believes them, or nobody cares anymore, everyone is just tired of hearing them complain, when they aren't just complaining, they're legitimately asking "how do I survive an entire life like this?"  There are still people who think fibromyalgia is something made up by lazy people, old people, obese people, or mentally ill to explain away their aches and pains and get them out of doing things.  There still are very few studies being done on how to fix it, where it starts, the long term physiological/psychological effects of chronic pain.  If in my lifetime, somehow, all of this changes, I will stop pushing awareness, but for now, I push awareness because we still need it.