Love: a strength, not illness

It’s amazing when certain circumstances lead to a realization that just completely hits you. When fate, destiny, time or God commands you to piece things together. An intense, overwhelming understanding hits you like a freight train. It paralyzes you with emotion.

For weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out how to word this column. I’ve written and written and written, and each time it turned into a sob story. It turned into a pit of sadness that plotted to suck the reader in.

I wanted to explain my older sister to the world. She’s not your average older sister. She deals with an interesting mixture of mental illnesses. There’s some OCD, social anxiety, slight autism and developmental delay.

Which means she’s anxious, nervous and has trouble understanding everyday interactions with people. She misses certain things. Simple math, sarcasm and nuances just don’t register with her.

And depending on the medicine she’s taking, she may start to hear voices. Or she’ll gain a horrendous, transformative amount of weight. Or she’ll succumb to pseudo-seizures.

There’s a part of me that wants so badly to tell you everything. To tell you of all the pain that comes from this. The stares in church. The stuttering and seizures. The incomprehensible ways it plays with your emotions.

But frankly, that’s enough already. This isn’t a pit of darkness. Not any more.

Not since this realization, which interestingly enough, came from someone I don’t even know.

I superficially thought this person made easy sense until I heard this person give some genuinely powerful words.

These words and a few tears revealed something I hadn’t seen before. I sensed a pain or struggle. Why hadn’t this been so evident before?

I think it’s for one simple reason: strength. Having strength means taking your pain and using it to be the best you can be. Rather than ignore it, it motivates you. And this motivation becomes your rock.

It drives you in your pursuits and gives you the will to improve. It pushes you to do impossible things for yourself, for those you love and for the world.

It doesn’t mean holding this pain above your head for all to see. It means doing incredible things that a loudspeaker of suffering could never accomplish.

While my mind may play tricks on me, I know in my heart that my sister has never been my darkness. But that doesn’t mean the switch is at the brightest it can be. For her to always be my light, I must keep in mind the bright.

Like playing games of Sorry. Seeing the puppies at the mall. Going for drives to the grocery store. And those incredibly long hugs she gives that never seem to end and shouldn’t.

My original draft ended by saying nothing is wrong with our love. This one ends by saying nothing is stronger than our love.

And of course, a thank you to a very strong person out there.

­— chagiff@indiana.edu