Who Holds You on Your Hard Days

By Victoria (Tori) Martinez

I am the eldest daughter. I spent most of my life caring for others and holding things together. Maybe you can relate, maybe you know what it's like to always be the strong one.

Now that I'm sick, I feel like I'm being taken care of for the first time in my life. Just let that sink in for a minute. Life as an eldest daughter can make changing roles difficult. It hasn’t been easy for me to admit my body isn’t as strong as it used to be, that my activities are limited now, that I am limited now.

If you're lucky enough to find someone who can hold you on your darkest days that's amazing and rare. If you don't have someone like that in your life, and even if you do they can't be your everything, you need to learn radical self-care. I have made the commitment to be honest and authentic with you so here's my story.

Illness has brought me to a humble place, that has made my illusions of control crack wide open.

My daughter, exhausted from being woken up too early, handed me an ice chip as the machine next to me pumped me full of saline and medication. I looked around the now familiar emergency room and prayed this visit wouldn’t be as long as the last one. But mostly I found a deeper connection to my daughter, filled with gratitude and pride of the young woman I saw before me. The moment inspired a poem about parenthood and paternal love.

If you’ve seen my YouTube Series on my new journal, you’d know that I chose LOVE as my word for this year. It’s amazing how the universe/God works to bring more love into my life, or maybe just works to make me better recognize the love I already have. Either way, I felt love expanding in that small, dimly lit room.

Even though I’ve been managing my illness for over a decade, I had still managed to fool myself into thinking that I could control this with diet, gentle movement, meditation, and meds. Those are all good things that certainly have helped me, but it turns out this was different. This was new, this was out of my control. This time as part of my autoimmunity and my body attacking itself, my body now decided to make too much blood. I now have polycythemia and they must remove the extra blood; with the biggest needle I’ve ever seen.

In that moment Irony was really playing with me. As I lay in that emergency room, I had a devastating realization: just as I had learned to overgive as the eldest daughter, my body was now overgiving too. Producing more blood than it could safely hold, as if it too believed survival required excess.

I have come to understand that our healing journeys are more than physical healing they are also, and maybe more so, about emotional healing. Life isn’t always pretty, organized, structured, or in our control. Allow yourself to find beauty in the chaos and messiness. Allow yourself to make deeper emotional connections with the people who matter to you the most. Allow yourself to let go of control and let others hold you

Today, take your journal (or grab your copy of my newly released journal) and write about a moment when you lost control and how that felt. Would you do things differently, what did it teach you?

Ps. The poem I wrote about my daughter will be included in an upcoming poetry book about LOVE. Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up-to-date and get a behind the scenes look.