“It's all shits and giggles until someone shits.”
Ah, the humble bowel prep is once again imminent this evening as I head into yet another colonoscopy. As a woman suffering from aggressive bowel endometriosis, I am reminded of cutting weight for comp. However, instead of starving oneself half to death to get onto a platform and possibly win a medal, I have the unfortunate task of lying flat to have a camera literally inserted into my butt while half awake. Honestly, lifting in a competition in a depleted state had much the same feeling from memory as the experience of a colonoscopy. It's all very aggressive, and painful, with little chance of a good result.
But much like any painful journey, we must undertake to progress as humans, whether it's reaching our goals or ensuring proper daily bowel movements, we have to fight the good fight and get the job done. Throughout my adult life, I have been a high-level competitive athlete and a woman with an aggressive chronic illness. Much of my life has consisted of long, hard, relentless periods of pain and adversity, often coupled with the disadvantage of pain and days of forced starvation.
But from all those years of struggle, I have learned a lot about self-compassion, patience, consistency, courage, and ambition. I have learned to face each day of relentless pain head-on, using the adversity and disadvantage of starvation to fuel my compassion, set and cultivate my patience, and build and strengthen my courage, while also igniting the flame of infinite ambition within me.
Winning isn’t always about the medals it is about being brave and doing shit you don’t like doing, then waking up the next day and hoping you can do the shit again.
Much love from me to you Mtuna xx