Make Yourself Your First Priority

This disease taught me that life is too short to care about everyone else all the time. I struggled with this a lot, I still do. I want everyone else to be okay then I worry about myself and that’s not how it should work. You always need to come first; everyone else can take care of themselves. When I was sick I would always worry about how everyone else would handle the news, and how everyone else was dealing with it. Looking back now, that makes absolutely no sense at all. That is probably the number one reason I was so mentally messed up when I was really sick, because I was too busy dealing with everyone else’s emotions (even when they had nothing to do with my battle) to deal with my own.

I’m not saying become totally selfish because that’s not good either. I’m saying that you can’t lose touch with yourself trying to take care of everyone else. You might want to, but no matter how hard you try you won’t be able to and that’ll end up hurting you more and more as time goes on. You need to take care of yourself first and foremost because no one else is going to.

This is the same advice I’d give anyone, but emphasize it for people like us. Shed all negative, judgmental, over dramatic, hypocritical people. They only make things worse as time goes on. Life is too short and you already have too much on your plate to have to deal them too.