It was also a great opportunity to meet people from the online MS community whom I had followed for years: the likes of Dave, from Active MSers, and another Dave, from MS Fitness Challenge, along with a number of other chronic illness writers and “personalities” from the online patient world. It was a wonderful experience! I recently got a survey via email from the organization asking me to vote for a theme for this year’s conference (which will be held in person as well as online). I voted for “The Pivot,” because I felt it fit in so well with how the world at large got a glimpse into our world during the past couple of years.
We’ve All Had to Pivot These Past Few Years
Even though I never played basketball myself, when I think of pivoting, that’s what comes to mind. On the court, you can move with the ball without dribbling if you pivot around in circles with one foot planted on the floor. It affords the player with the ball a chance to shift direction, see other options, and avoid aggressive defensive opponents without risk of possession being turned over (or at least more easily taken away). In the COVID-19 era, employers have similarly had to keep their values and objectives firmly planted while they and their workers pivoted around in search of ways to move the ball of profitability toward the basket. It has meant figuring out how people might work remotely, how to reengage with disconnected customers, when to be cautious and when to be bold, and what the new normal was going to look like as the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic began to ebb. If ever there were an analogy the business world could put to good use from the experiences of someone learning to cope with a chronic illness, it’s executing a required and — as in this case — unexpected pivot.
How I Learned to Pivot After an MS Diagnosis
Those of us who have attained any level of what can be called “success” after being diagnosed with a chronic illness such as multiple sclerosis (MS) have indeed had one foot planted to life’s court by our conditions. I can almost hear the squeaking of rubber-soled shoes on hardwood as my life’s forward momentum came to a shrieking halt in April 2001. MS was all up in my face like a swarm of very tall, very large professional players trying to steal the ball from my grasp and thus prevent me from attaining what I would have considered my life’s baskets. We all had to figure how to move around and see other options with our disease holding that one foot down. At first, I tried to fight off the effects of MS using the same tactics I had formerly used to move up and down my court. Between a disease holding me down and its symptoms swatting at my goals, I eventually (I wish I could say “quickly,” but if I’m being honest with myself, it took far too many years for my cascade of contingencies to be understood as anything but “eventually”) came to understand that I had a team around me that could help me move the ball forward even if I wasn’t the one carrying it. In turning away from what was once an obvious goal, I was able to see other pathways, other allies, other chances to attain eventual success.
Not All Options Are Good Ones
It wasn’t and still isn’t always easy to pivot from one direction to another. There are often more difficulties coming at us from that angle as well. If symptoms make full-time work harder and harder, we might pivot to the thought of part-time, only to find that that option won’t pay the bills. From there, perhaps, we found a pivot to full-time work that was partly remote or that came with lower stress than other options. If one MS drug therapy didn’t work, we might have pivoted to something else, but the washout period that many medications require may have brought on a whole other spate of symptoms swatting at our ball.
Learning to Choose Is a Process
On the basketball court, a pivot may be an exciting and even graceful maneuver, but in real life it tends to be ungainly, and our forward momentum is always stopped. To master the pivot, however, can allow for reevaluation of our goals, a new view of available options, and the understanding that there are others out there playing the game with us who only succeed if we are successful ourselves. I don’t know if HealtheVoices will choose The Pivot for its conference topic this year. All the potential choices were worthy. For me, however, the current moment feels like one of the few times the rest of the world could learn a little something from those of us they’d so easily discarded when we could no longer drive down the court like we used to. Wishing you and your family the best of health. Cheers, Trevis
