Invisible illness comes with visible bullying. There's a lack of understanding when it comes to the immense strain that cystic fibrosis causes in everyday life. That ignorance is infested with a lot of pain.
I was bullied the most because of CF when I was in high school. I was healthy enough to be on the basketball team, but I wasn't healthy enough to keep up with everyone running sprints. My teammates couldn't understand why I couldn't finish the wind sprints like them. I looked the part. I was tall and athletic, but they would make fun of me for being “out of shape.” My coaches didn't understand, either.
Teachers even made fun of me for having CF. I was class president, and our teacher sponsor joked that I was a bad president because I kept missing school. It's hard when people in positions of power question your illness, especially when you're a child; it makes it hard to trust authority.
Over the years, these instances caused different responses from me. Sometimes I became angry, other times I was sad. Sometimes I got a laugh at people's ignorance. Truthfully, the main reaction was pain.
It hurt knowing that my life was going in a downward spiral and people didn't seem to care. When death came knocking, it didn't seem like people were helping me keep him out. They seemed to nonchalantly want to let him in.
I've learned that I need to forgive people that treat me poorly because of my CF. When people hurt you, it's because they are in pain themselves. That's the only way for pain to spread -- it's like an infection. Now, when someone makes a comment about me coughing, or gets frustrated and takes it out on me for canceling plans at the last minute, I take a step back and remember they must be in just as much pain as I am.
Sometimes my initial response is still anger or sadness, but I do my best to forgive so that I can release them and myself from the pain we both share.
Forgiveness isn't an excuse for someone's poor behavior; it's simply transforming something made of fear into something made of love. We were put here to become alchemists and transform fear to love. Life will throw painful situations, like nasty comments, in our faces and it's our job not to take that pain and not spread it further. We must stop it in its tracks and return with an expression of love.
This may seem wrong to a lot of people because we live in a culture in which we justify our anger when people do us wrong. But we need to change the mentality if we're going to bring healing to ourselves and the world around us. Those of us who have CF and our families and friends affected by it already suffer so much pain. We don't need to create more by harboring resentment for those that hurt us. In a world where healing seems so impossible, this is a thing we can control, where we can make it happen.