If there is one thing in life I love, it has to be coincidences, those things that appear from nowhere and match up like some kind of spooky voodoo. I always organise my set Tweets either one or even two days in advance, especially the quotes as they don’t relate to anything other than the fact I like them. It had to have been Saturday when I set up this quote “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. – Douglas Adams” to be sent on Monday along with another 17 totally unconnected quotes. It was pure coincidence that on Monday I wrote about the fact that due to being housebound and my illness, I had connected to several things that made me feel so much better as a person. When the quote went out someone replied saying “I don’t think you really mean that Pam, do you…”, I had forgotten about the quote until I saw the response and without thinking I replied, “Well actually, I think I do”. If I hadn’t just written a post on finding happiness in my illness, I don’t think that would have been my answer, as I realised as I was writing it that I actually have much to be grateful for my situation, not just the time that allowed me to rebuild parts of my inner self and a new understanding of life which I had totally missed when I was out there living it. After I answered the tweet I sat for a while and I thought about it even further and I realised that it all went a lot deeper than that.

The more I thought about it, the more I started to realise that this probably is where I was meant to be, maybe not in actual location, as in housebound, but where I was supposed to be as a person. I have written before how about my life had been more drifting from one thing to another with little thought about what job or where I was going to live, it all just sort of happened to me. Opportunities would appear and I always just went with them, with the background thought of “Well if it goes wrong, I can start over again”, starting over has been part of my life since I was a child and not even now, does it hold any fear for me. It doesn’t matter what reincarnation of myself you chose to look at, there is one thing they all have in common, I have always gone for it 100%, I had to do whatever it was at the highest standard I could achieve. From the housewife and mother who didn’t just cook and clean, but made clothes for the whole family, baked fresh bread and cakes daily and kept an entire house that was permanently perfect; to the only professional female DJ in Scotland and I made sure there wasn’t a genera that I couldn’t handle; to the sales person who outsold all around her and did it honestly; to the Operations Manager who learned to program so I could build quickly bespoke software to cover every aspect of my job; all to my highest standard. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when I found myself housebound that I was going to take this opportunity and find the way of adding value to this reincarnation as well. You would have to be mad to want to be housebound, but here I am and here I have to stay.

The third coincidence I think came on Tuesday, I was asked if I had been able to find meaningful work from home, I had to answer honestly and say that despite nearly two years of applying for anything suitable and sending out my CV to every employment agency I could find in the UK, the answer was no. No real companies want to offer real jobs to people who can’t get to their offices and that appears to be a fact. I worked at home for three years, but that was for a company I had already worked for for nearly 10 years when I became housebound. There are millions of companies out there who advertise for home workers, but you won’t make money out of it, the jobs aren’t real and should be avoided, especially those who ask for money from you before you start, to buy kits and so on. I know that I don’t make a penny from what I do online, despite the ads that everyone thinks make you a fourtune, the truth is people don’t click them often enough for them to generate anything like enough money to call them worthwhile, mine make enough to pay for this site and that is it, but this is my job. I created what for me is something I treat like a job, as it fills that space with a useful activity. Then I was asked today if I could advise someone on how to survive their llness and I sent them a link to my “seven steps” post, which is something that I still believe in, but their question was the fourth coincidence and it pushed me into writing this post. I realised that the one thing missing from those seven steps is something that has to come from ourselves, others can inspire it, but we have to apply it and that detemination, if your not determoned to make your life as useful as possible, you are going to find life hard and that goes across the healthy and the chronically ill.

Four things that are all about the same thing and something that is amazingly important, our quality of life and how we see ourselves. Yes, in a strange way I do now think this is where I was supposed to be, because I have taken what could have been a depressing and difficult thing to deal with and I have found the good in it and used it for good. I have built something I am proud of and although it doesn’t make money, I am as committed to this as I was everything else that I have done in my life. If we can find one thing, it doesn’t matter what it is, but something that inspires ourselves and we find fufilling, it is going to make us happy, earnings or not and none of us can survive chronic illness without happiness. It is a hard road at first, but even with all the downsides that I talk about here in my posts, there are just as many upsides that I talk about as well, but they are all things that we have to be determinded to succeed with or the result will be not worth thinking about. I think the quote from Douglas Alan fits my life really well, but it also speaks to all of us, as where ever we are, if we can find the good and make it work for us, well eventually we will feel as though what took us there did have a purpose after all.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 22/04/13 – Soothing the fears

The week starts again and Adam has headed out to work which, of course, means once more I am on my own. I find it strange how many people find being alone so hare to bare, just this morning I read a tweet from someone who is still able-bodied but it facing a future of possible housebound existence, and although there is only 140chars to send as a message, I could feel their pain and fear towards the whole idea. Maybe the fact that……