Life is a game. It has its ups and downs; sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Currently, I find myself on the downslope. I write to remember about this moment, for when life gets though, that’s when life teaches us the most.

Despite not being in my best condition, this chapter of life is beautiful to me. When choices are limited or budgets are tight, we are forced to choose priorities. And therein lies the blessing in disguise.

For the first decades of my life, I was pressured to always excel. As the eldest daughter of the family, I bore the burden of being an example for my younger siblings, under constant scrutiny not only from my own family, but also from my extended relatives who always compared me to my cousins who are only one year older than me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I can see I was always afraid of being a failure. It felt like an unending competition—be it over report cards, physical growth, or even the boyfriends. As one by one of my cousins got married and had children, I felt the collective gazes turn towards me. Even after I married and started a family of my own, the fear of failure kept hunting me. Until the day of the car accident.

That accident left our car totaled, and I have never been the same. My body started acting weird –tingling sensations in my legs, an inexplicable fatigue, but the worst of all was excruciating stomach pain. At first, it happened only once a year, but then the frequency and the intensity increased. The pain was like something stabbing my stomach from the inside and squeezing it hard, made me lay on the floor, sweaty big like peas as I was sure I was about to die.

I went to a doctor specializing in gastroenterology, but he didn’t find anything wrong. Then one morning, I started to feel the slice not only happen to my stomach but spread to my back, arms, shoulders, and everywhere. I went to my primary care physician who is an internal medicine doctor. He examined me and finally diagnosed me with Fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a disorder where the brain misinterprets sensations as attacks, resulting in debilitating pain.

Since I was a child, I have always been a highly sensitive person. I empathize deeply with other people. I couldn’t watch movies with torture scenes because they scared me to death. But fibromyalgia changed that. It exposed me to every fear I’d ever had. I experienced the pain of barbed wire cutting, knives slicing, pins and needles in my eyes, the ache like being hit, electricity sharp pain, and every type of torture I could imagine. I even lost my ability to write because my fingers hurt all the time and I had serious brain fog. That’s when I understood why people with fibromyalgia are sometimes suicidal because living with this shell of a body with this kind of pain is torture in its truest form.

After the storms of disappointment and anger passed, I found solace in the absurdity of life. People spend days striving to achieve something when actually, to be able to sit after opening our eyes in the morning is already an achievement. When we are able to go down our bed, walk, and do many things on our own, not everyone can freely do that. And what’s funny is, no matter how high we already achieved something, we can always lose it anytime, in many ways possible. So what are we doing in this life? What is our purpose to breathe?

Life is nothing but a game; it tricks us. We are constantly fearing failure and trying hard to not become a failure compared to others when actually everyone is playing their own race. Life is not a competition. Each of us has our own track with its own challenges, and we just have to win ours. Expectations and perceptions of others do not mean anything.

Realizing this brought me freedom. I shed the burden of proving myself to others because I only have to focus on my present. It’s about me treasuring every breath I take in the morning and being able to think and do something in every minute. It’s about me facing my pain and uncertainty and learning how to win my own race. And that’s what makes me love this chapter of my life!