The Hard Work of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
I stumbled upon the blog site of someone named Seth Godin; he is a marketing guru, hardly an expert on IBS. He is also a very good and readable writer. His topic for today, Labor Day, was “work,” both the old-fashioned kind measured in productivity–chickens fed, hay baled, steel poured—and the kind of work measured in shifts of thought or attitude.
I liked the following so much I want to be able to get to it to remind myself. He said, toward the end of his post,
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.1
We should get paid, ya know? We do this kind of hard work every day of living with IBS.
That’s also the advantage of having IBS. It teaches us how to do this kind of work, and as we get more proficient, we realize we have skills and strengths that we can apply to many kinds of work–even the work of gaining more skills and strengths. “Or NOT,” do I hear you say?
Sophie still makes me laugh, Seth motivates me to continue blogging. What do you rely on to cope and to function?
- 1 http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/labor-day.html, accessed September 3, 2007 [↩]