When I first found out that I had rheumatoid arthritis, I felt like the world needed to stop turning and hang perfectly still on its axis until I could get my bearings and understand what was happening to me.  I wanted to hit pause on some universal remote control long enough to catch my breath and figure out what all of this meant and then be able to hit play when, and only when, I was ready.  But as we all know, life doesn’t stop just because you have RA.  I still had my job to do, bills to pay, decisions to make. I had to feed myself and do my laundry. I had to become med-savvy in what seemed like an instant while all of the rest of my life continued.  And then there was the avalanche of emotions that came with this kind of startling news that also had to be dealt with. Life barreled over me just the same as it had before RA.  A Chinese parable one of my favorite yoga teachers had once shared came back to me with the poignancy of an arrow straight into my heart: ‘I am happy; the birds fly over. I am sad; the birds fly over.’  Like it or not, I realized those damn birds were going to keep flying over with or without RA.

With time, I caught up. I figured out how to fit in the myriad doctor appointments.  Sticking needles into my thigh became routine instead of scary.  It also took less time as my anxiety about giving myself shots decreased and then vanished all together- something that seemed impossible at the beginning of this journey. I learned the meaning of the word ‘prioritize’ in a whole new way and applied the lesson to my life. I cut out what didn’t work and focused on what did. It wasn’t as easy or as smooth as this paragraph makes it sound, but I figured out how to manage because really, there wasn’t any other choice. ‘Ob La Di, Ob La Da, Life Goes On.’

And so mine did. As my meds kicked in and my life reordered itself, RA, which had been so front and center, slowly began to stop hogging all my attention. It left room for other parts of my life to have their time in the limelight. As more time went by, those other parts even took center stage and let RA recede into the background.  It’s still a part of the cast, and until a cure is found, it always will be, but thankfully, it’s no longer dominating my whole story.

In fact, recently the major themes dictating what direction my life would take have been love and romance. At the start of the year, it seemed that a move to Europe might be in the cards, but by April, that storyline had played itself out and fizzed into heartbreak.

And this is where life can be so wonderfully unpredictable. Just as I was about to write 2011 off as a crummy, no good year where nothing went right, an incredible job opportunity that was impossible to resist popped up.  And it wasn’t just any job- it was a job that would involve tons of travel and relocation to another city: Boston! Change was still in the air.