There's a fundamental right that some people just don't recognize as belonging to me: the right to live my life as I please. Complete with mistakes, complete with bad decisions - it's my life, and that's the end of it.
I'm not sure why some people feel otherwise. I can throw out my suspicions: these people feel powerless to help in any way, yet they wish to help. They might think the answer is as simple as telling me how to live, how to avoid this, or that, perceived problem.
They ignore that fundamental principle because it gives them an easy way out of the dilemma of the person who has the diagnosis of MF: they will ignore certain key data points (there is also always some data point they are ignoring) as well as my freedoms in order to feel power over the disease.
These people are not, normally, unreasonable people. I suspect that, in time, some of them will gain enough distance of perspective to be horrified by their behavior, and will realize the fool's folly they have been playing. Of course, this is applying a most liberal principle of charitable interpretation to their words.
I don't think (at least I seriously hope they don't realize this) they realize how much stress their behavior causes me: essentially, they are calling me a failure, and telling me that they possess better judgment, perception, reasoning, and ethical principles than I do. At this stage of my life, having lived things they haven't, that comes not only as an insult, but as something I find to be quite stressful.
Unfortunately, I am at a point where one of my goals is to recognize stress and eliminate it. This is important: any creator of stress in my life has a negative impact on my health, and I have learned that it must be eliminated. This means the friendship is doomed.
I have just navigated through one of those episodes, and more are coming: this blog is one source of such things. As I practice expressive writing, some of it strikes home with certain individuals whom I would consider to be emotionally petty, and they not only feel that my writing is unhealthy, but they feel it is up to them to make me stop such behavior, which in their eyes is putting me at risk.
These individuals have forgotten that their role, as a friend, is to support me: not to judge me, not to insist that their advice is the advice which I must follow. If they have known me longer than 15 minutes, they must realize that I'm not going to do things any way but my way - and that if anything, this guiding principle is stronger now during my final days than it ever was before.
I say "my final days:" the reality is that I might have six months left, I might have one year or two years left. There are no good answers to the question of "how long?", but it is not clear-cut. I mention this because it is a data point that should be included in these decisions.
I have much more to say, much more to think through. I think, however, I'm going to write a book which has a bit of a self-help twist. As most of the things I write happen to come about, this is something that is bugging me enough that I'm getting a lot of it written in my mind; the structure is coming together nicely, as are the various segments, which intertwine the abstract with sample stories from my life.
In the meantime, if you have been DXd with MF, take your time in dealing with it all; try to not let your head get away from you. Embrace the struggle of looking for answers - ultimately, any answer must come from you and you alone, you might as well get used to that.
