macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis Turn Your Mind – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

Turn Your Mind

Hello, there! Good day today.

I taught class this morning. What started out as a four man, teaching team – two on for 12 weeks, two off – is now down to two people. Looks like my colleague and I are teaching until further notice. There is a DBT teacher training in the Fall and we are strongly ‘encouraging’ some of the younger folks in the office to take it. Really cannot have no depth in our teacher pool. My colleague has already informed me – should I have a huge drop in vision – she will lead me into our classroom white cane in my hand☺. I would say it is nice to think I would be missed but I believe it has more to do with not wanting to abandon the DBT program?!

Taught radical acceptance today. Made the point it is radical because it involves a huge shift in a lot of core feelings and beliefs.

You don’t accept being someone who is visually impaired over lunch, for example.

That will bring us to radical acceptance being an ongoing process. You remember: “every day in every way we are getting better and better.” Every day we accept a little more of our new identity and the ways we now have to live our lives. It is an incremental thing.

And THAT brings us to turning the mind. [Click here for one of Sue’s past pages about turning the mind.]

I remember graduate school…many, many years ago, but I remember it! There was a diabetic kid living on the ground floor. Every week he would smoke marijuana and get a massive case of the munchies. After eating a couple of bags of snacks, this kid would go into a diabetic crisis and someone would call the ambulance. Rinse. Repeat.

This kid needed a good dose of radical acceptance. (He also probably needed a kick in the ass, but that is another page.) He was not like the other college kids. He could not drink and smoke and eat like them. Not and live to tell the tale, at any rate. That was a fact that was not going to change but he did not want to accept.

Part of the problem was he was in an environment surrounded by other kids all doing what he could not do. He was faced with the choice of going along (and just about dying) or abstaining several times a week.

Turning the mind is deciding to make the appropriate choice….again and again and again ad nauseum. Every time you have a chance to either accept your situation or reject it, you have to force yourself towards acceptance. There is no “just this once” or “I will do it next time”. The situation this kid was in may not have given him a next time.

Life is going to give you lots of opportunities to reject your ‘new reality’ and doing so is very tempting. But in the long run will not accepting reality change it one little bit? I suspect the truth will remain what it is whether people believe it or not. It will still be there to deal with, so you might as well get started. Turn your mind towards acceptance.

Next: Shimmering

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