How Living With Cystic Fibrosis Has Made me a Happier Person

Whenever I tell someone I have Cystic Fibrosis and they find out I have to take over 50 pills a day, hook myself up to a machine for an hour a day, and go to the hospital for weeks everytime I get sick their first response is to pity me.

This the machine I use everyday

Whenever they tell me how sorry they are for me or how bad they feel that I have to live like this I always say "why? I love my life!" This kind of throws some people off but its true, I love my life and I don't want anything about it to change.
You maybe thinking "surely he would rather not have to live with CF" but honestly I don't. Having Cystic Fibrosis has taught me so much about life and who I am as a person that I would never learn if I was born completely healthy. The two most important things I have learned from living with this disease is you never know how much time you have on this earth and your attitude determines your altitude.

You Never Know How Much Time you Have on This Earth

My dad would always tell me to be thankful for today because you never know if you have a tomorrow. When I would hear this when I was younger I would just brush it off as something obvious that parents tell their kids, like duh dad of course I knew that you can die at anytime. However, it wasn't until I was about 15 and I was on google and somehow stumbled upon the average life expectancy of someone with CF which was 32 at the time. I remember I just stared at the screen in shock. I knew that CF was a pretty serious disease and all but I had no idea that I had basically already lived half of my life. This hit me really hard. After that for the next couple of days I would randomly zone out and think about what I had saw and just kept thinking I was basically a middle aged man in a teenager's body. I was scared because prior to that I thought I would live to be atleast 80 because other than having CF I was a perfectly normal and healthy kid.
This negative thinking followed over me like a cloud until one day I thought back to what my dad would always say, "be thankful for today because you don't know if you have a tomorrow." Then I realized instead of focusing on how much time I have left to live, I should focus on how to make the most of the time I do have. This was sort of an epiphany for me even though it just seems like something everyone should be doing regardless. Before that 'epiphany' I would have all these great ideas of how I was going to do this or that and how I was going to transform my life but after I would have these ideas I would tell myself that I would act on these ideas "tomorrow". Then when tomorrow would come I would be 'busy'(I use that word very loosely) doing something else and I would say to myself again "tomorrow". As you probably know, "tomorrow" never came and I would waste these great ideas with inaction. Do you know what the worst part was, I was completely okay with my inaction because I would just tell myself that I was young and I had plenty of time to do these things later.
You best believe after my 'epiphany' this all changed. While it wasn't immediate, it takes some time to break old habits, I was able to become a person that no longer said "I'll do that tomorrow" and became a person that says "what can I do to start on this today." I no longer take my youth or time for granted because I now understand that our time is one of the most valuable things we have and we never know when that time is going to run out.

Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude

I know by this point you are thinking "why is this turning into some sappy motivational post? That's not what I clicked on this article for." Just please bare with me.
So what do I mean by your attitude determines your altitude? I mean that the everybody has a choice to make. You can either chose to focus on all the bad things in you life. The reasons that you can't do things or the things that put you at an unfair disadvantage to other people and use these things as excuses to why you can't do things. Or you can make the decision to focus on all the good things you have going for you (everybody can be thankful for at least one thing in their life) and accept that everybody goes through shit in their lives and you can't let that hold you back.
I made the decision a long time ago to focus on all the positive things in my life and to never let my health or any other negative thing in my life hold me back from doing what I want to do. I personally think that decision has been my greatest motivator in life. Not only do I not let my health situation hold me back, I use it as motivation to achieve my goals because I don't know how much time I have left on this Earth.
With that said I suggest that you chose to live your life as someone who focuses on what they do have and not on the negative things that you have going on with your life. However, I know that I am not you and I can't tell anybody else how to live their life. But, if you want to be a happier and more driven person chose to be the person who views the glass as half full not half empty. I think your life will improve drastically because of it.

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