When I first started dabbling into changing my diet, YouTube was a lifeline for me. There's such a wealth of information out there, but it can be easy to fall down the wrong rabbit hole. When my interest in veganism was piqued, I ended up looking at YouTubers that were promoting a lifestyle that I knew wouldn't be sustainable for me in the long term. As much as I like fruit and vegetables, I couldn't eat them raw all day every day. I struggle enough trying to get myself to eat the same thing two days in a row. Not that there is anything wrong with a raw diet. If it works for you, that's great and you keep doing you.
If you're interested in veganism, here for 6 YouTubers I watch, that you may find useful.
So, on Sunday I am turning 26 years old. I thought that I would be bothered about it, but I’m not. Getting older just doesn’t seem to bother me, it hasn’t for a long, long time. I actually quite like getting older because I like to reflect and see how I’ve changed and what I did over the year. I know some people don’t like to reflect, especially when they have lost someone throughout the year, but I think if you are constantly wanting to evolve as a person then this is an important practice to get into. Or maybe I’m just weird like that.
- I may no longer care about getting older, but when I was 9 turning 10 terrified me because entering double digits meant I was getting older and thus becoming an adult.
I feel like this is going to be a bit of an inflammatory post, I really do, especially within the spoonie community, or whatever it is we are calling ourselves these days. Are we warriors, spoonies, or munchkins? I don’t know. What I do know is that there are things some chronically ill people need to learn. I find a lot of the community to be incredibly negative and it personally puts me off.
1. You are not your illness.
You were a person before you got ill and you are still a person. Whatever your illness is, it doesn’t define you. If you were Andrea with the multi-coloured hair before you got ill, as long as dying your hair doesn’t make you worse – I know with some illnesses you become really sensitive to things so don’t make yourself ill to prove a point – you can still be Andrea with the multi-coloured hair. I’m still the same person I was before the diagnosis. I just move a little slower and rattle a little more than I did.
This blog post was originally published on Madeleine Larmour Blog on 3rd January 2016. Whilst the blog still exists as an archive, I no longer chose to post there and thus have decided to move some of the content here to share with all of you.
So yet again, we have somehow stumbled into a New Year. Sure, we’re a little battered and bruised from 2016 but we’ve gotten through to the light at the end of the tunnel. That light is another new year and with it, it brings the renewed promise of change. Change that doesn’t usually stick, but it’s always nice to be reminded that we have the ability to change even if it’s unlikely to last.
