The Outstanding Quest

Back in 2009, I wrote the blog entry titled “Expect Frustration.”  Yesterday I got an email that “anonymous” had left a comment, which read “outstanding quest there.  What happened then?”

I looked up “quest” on dictionary.com and found the main two definitions of the word as a noun to be:

1.

A search or pursuit made in order to find or obtain something: a quest for uranium mines; a quest for knowledge.

2.

Medieval Romance . An adventurous expedition undertaken by a knight or knights to secure or achieve something: the quest of the Holy Grail.

Since my writings about Fibromyalgia just don’t fit into the medieval or romantic category, I will take the anonymous comment to just mean a search or pursuit.  And that certainly does fit.  I am undoubtedly on a search to learn how to live as free of pain as possible.  And I am passionately in pursuit of a cure.  That isn’t to say that there is a cure, or that I would be the one smart enough or lucky enough to find it, but I’m unquestionably passionate about pursuing it.

If you’ve never heard of Victor Frankl, you won’t completely understand my next train of thought, so allow me to digress a bit.   Victor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor.  He spent time in a Nazi concentration camp, while his wife and parents were put to death.   After becoming free again, he founded the concept of logotherapy, a method of dealing with human psychological problems by attaching meaning to them.  I remember one story from his book, “Search for Meaning’ that illustrates it well. A man lost his wife, to whom he was incredibly close.  He became horribly depressed at her death and sought out Frankl in order to find some way to cope.  Frankl asked what his wife would have felt had the man died first.  “She would have had a very difficult time” the man answered.  Frankl then told the man that she had been spared of that.  His living on alone meant that his wife was not suffering alone without him.  Thinking about it that way gave meaning to his suffering, and allowed him to live on with a changed perspective.  

More than once I’ve attempted to put meaning to the pain I feel because of Fibromyalgia.  I began writing this blog in order to reach others and help reduce their pain.  It hasn’t been as successful as I would have liked, but it has had some benefits I didn’t anticipate.  And getting the anonymous comment after not writing for two years was certainly a neat surprise.  

The anonymous comment asked, “What happened then?”   Well, after my story about frustration, my life continued day after day.  It is much like an endless replay of the movie “Groundhog Day.”  I continue on “the quest” to end the pain of Fibromyalgia.  Many days are pain free.  Some days are a real struggle.  The quest continues.

The quest is not one of my choosing.  It is more like the quest undertaken by someone who finds themselves lost in the woods.  They have no choice about their next action; they need to find their way.  

I’d like to think that it is me that makes the quest outstanding, that somehow I am special or have found a unique road.  But I can clearly see that it is the Fibromyalgia that distinguishes this search.  

And so it is that today I have come to understand that just as all who are lost in the woods must take up the desperate search to find their way, all who are afflicted with Fibromyalgia must embark on the outstanding quest.    Few people know what this involves.  I know what it involves, and to those on the outstanding quest, I applaud your courage and your fortitude.