I have incredible confidence, but for the most part it’s incredibly quiet confidence, borne of a life spent in pain and taking every day and every accomplishment as a personal, private victory.

Only I know what I have been through, and I couldn’t describe it all to anyone even if I tried. I know I can get through anything, with patience and belief in myself and my abilities. If I doubted what I was capable of, I would not have had the experiences I have.

It is difficult for me to walk very far without my body stiffening up and causing me considerable pain. On a good day I can last about an hour and a half before this becomes a problem, and on a bad day it’s a struggle to walk a few blocks. I could quite easily decide that I can’t walk distances, and sit down and watch the world pass me by. I just decided that it’s quite okay to take lots of breaks, to sit and rest and then go again, and that walking is one of the best things for me. I have been afraid of how I would get around when my husband and I have traveled, but because I decided to just see what happens and have a patient companion, I have been to some amazing places.

Knowing your own daily struggles and acknowledging to yourself the powerful person that you are, even if it is just because you are able to get through the day, will lead to an internal strength and confidence that cannot be shaken.

I have enjoyed guest posting here on Dr. Greene’s site. I know I have spent countless hours using this site as a resource about food, sleep and more when it comes to my young son. I want to thank the Greenes for the experience, and welcome people wanting to read more about this subject matter to visit me at www.mylifeisinmyhands.blogspot.com

If you can’t hide it, embrace it.

From fairly early on after being diagnosed with Arthritis, my joints started to change. I used to get embarrassed at people looking at my hands – they look like an 80-year-old woman’s hands. A newspaper reporter once wrote in what was actually a lovely article written about me, that if there was a jewelry line for the Wicked Witch of the West, I could be the hand model.

I used to wear my sleeves down over my hands to cover them up, and certainly not ever make gestures with them. But at some point of my metamorphosis, when I came out of that self-protective shell I began to learn to express myself in a more physical manner. Now I talk with my hands, use them naturally to illustrate a mood or point, and hope people look at them and that if they do wonder about my deformed fingers or scars, or my stiff movements when my lower joints are in flare, they’ll also ask.

I believe in capitalizing upon what makes me different – I was never afraid to describe myself as a reporter with a disability. As a matter of fact, I had wished that the outlets I had worked with when I was a broadcast journalist would help me to get the word out because it was very important for me to show kids with disabilities that a very dynamic and public career was possible for them.

I want people to ask questions. I have spent time as a motivational speaker for groups from school children to medical and physiotherapy students, to doctors. In the spring I plan to start a blog for people with Arthritis, and this year I will write a proposal for a book that is aimed at helping young people accept their diagnosis and future.

We spend so much of our young lives wanting to be like everyone else until eventually we want to step away from the pack. What a better way than to embrace our uniqueness – a characteristic, trait, or in my case, condition, that makes us every bit of who we are.

I’m short, so I have to ask for help at the grocery store when the item I want is on the top shelf. Is there any reason to feel embarrassed or silly about having to ask for assistance in reaching something? Not at all. So why should I feel embarrassed when asking for help with something that I can’t do because of my Arthritis?

For me, learning how to accept help, graciously and gracefully, started from a young age. My finger and wrist joints needed daily physiotherapy and after soaking in either ice water or heating up with a coating of hot wax (depending if I was in a flare at the time), my mother or my sister would push my joints through range of motion exercises.

When I lived with her during university, my sister would wake up without complaint after a late shift as a restaurant manager before my early 8:00am classes to turn on the bathtub taps for me and help me on with my socks. My husband does so much for me I wouldn’t even know where to begin, and friends help me however they can. I don’t know that they’ll ever understand how grateful I am for their support, which was always so much more than the physical tasks.

I have learned over the years that it’s not just friends and family who will lend a helping hand, either. The kindness of strangers has been proven to me time and time again, whether I buy bottle of juice and the clerk happily opens it for me, or a perfect stranger answers my appeal to help with the gas cap on my car, or open a particularly heavy door.

Yes, it is important to me to be independent and strong, but a long time ago I realized that independent and strong doesn’t mean able to open a jar or lift a heavy box.

One recommendation I can make is that it’s important to let people in your life know that they should hold off on doing absolutely everything for you, until they hear you asking for help. It can get very easy to get comfortable with having someone do all of those tough things for you, when you might just be able to surprise yourself with an ability you had previously written off. On a good day I can get my socks on by myself, so my husband knows I am having difficulties when I ask for “sock assistance”, and either way, he’s there for me.

Pain is an interesting phenomenon to me. Isn’t it a fascinating self-protection measure that we cannot truly recall extreme pain once it has abated? From the raw pain of recovery from a surgery to cut a bone out of my wrist to natural childbirth, once the event has passed I will only know that it hurt, and badly, but to try to remember how it felt or even to compare the two or other experiences would be truly difficult, if not impossible.

Further, you can’t know someone else’s pain. That’s the thing about pain – it’s almost impossible to describe. You can give it a color or a number, a personality or a mood, but you can never make someone else feel the way you feel. And in that way, you will also have difficulty describing your pain to someone, and they’ll have difficulty understanding it. Knowing this and accepting it can prevent a lot of disappointment from someone failing to meet your expectations of how to respond to your pain.

Theoretically I understand that my husband’s pulled muscle hurts a lot, and I am pretty sure that it hurts a lot less than the dislocated knuckles of my hands when I try to open a tight jar, but so many factors play into our perception of pain that as it turns out, I might actually be feeling better than him…but we cannot know.

Everyone’s pain is his or her own.

Not only that, there’s very likely someone worse off than you, no matter how much pain you are in. That has never been much of a consolation to me – I’ve never wished pain on anyone else – but the lesson here is that no matter what your malady, there’s probably something much worse that you can be thankful you don’t have.

My recommendation for when you’re feeling like people don’t understand your pain, is to just work to understand it well yourself. I try to listen to what my pain is telling me, not let it become background noise. Pain is usually a signal that I ought to be protecting a joint, not pushing it, and this is why I rarely take painkillers. I am not advocating stopping pain medication to anyone, but for me it feels like shooting the messenger.

When I understand this, I’m more okay with the fact that others don’t. I’d really rather know myself well than have others know me.

I hurt.

A lot.

Every day.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I am not addicted to pain, I’d rather not live with it, and I don’t want to be a martyr to it, but if ever given the choice of going back and reliving the past 32 years without the chronic pain of Rheumatoid Arthritis, I’d say no thanks, I’ll take it – and all of the life lessons the pain has brought.

I was diagnosed at age six with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. It immediately brought pain and stiffness…and bullying from young classmates who thought I was lucky to get to miss school. What they didn’t realize was that I was getting blood tests, painful injections and physiotherapy sessions to manipulate my stiffening joints.

I was different than my peers at a tender time in life when different was the last thing most kids wanted to be. But over the years I have learned to not only come to terms with my disease but to also embrace it – accepting that what has made me different has also made me special, and it has made me strong.

My experiences with this disease and its debilitating pain, stiffness and deformation of joints that have required surgery, has been the greatest contributing factor to my character, work ethic and resiliency. Without this disease, who would I be, where would I be, and what would I be doing? Obviously I cannot know but one thing is for sure – I would be a very different person. I like who I am, where I am and what I have done, so it stands to reason that if there was any way to go back and change the course of my life, I’d choose to stay on the same path.

I’ve had an incredible career so far, excelling as a journalist. I have been a television reporter, host, writer and producer, a radio reporter and producer, writer for newspapers, magazines and web sites, editor-in-chief of a magazine and in March of this year I will debut my brand new e-magazine, co-created with two other superstars.

Sixteen years ago when I started my career in the media as a television reporter, a huge change came over me. Once I got over the astonishment of being asked to be on camera (me, the girl with the ugly hands and the stiff movements), I experienced an awakening. It was in watching myself on the screen that I finally began to see myself…and more importantly, to like and feel comfortable with what I saw.

I have been called an old soul by those who know me, and I like to think that I have lessons to teach others that come from the experiences I have had. I pepper presentations that I give school groups and classes of medical and physiotherapy students with these tidbits gleaned from my years with pain as my constant companion.

And so I’d like to share with you over the next five days, what pain has taught me.

Tough Luck

God, the universe, the world, the government (choose your deity/group/organization) doesn’t owe anyone anything.

I guess this lesson could be called, Life Isn’t Fair. Because, it isn’t…but as the kids like to say these days, it is what it is. People in unfortunate circumstances sometimes get stuck in the rut of, “If only..” or, “It’s not fair…” and that, frankly, is a waste of precious time.

Life won’t be easier in some way (in any way) for someone in pain all the time.

I have met people who have a disease or disability, or who suffer from chronic pain like I do, who have a sense of entitlement, like they deserve only good things because of what they go through. Well, I do deserve good things — we all do, but for the good we do, not the pain we feel.

It is terribly easy to fall into the trap of, “I have a harder time of it and so it should be easier for me in another way.” But life doesn’t balance out that way. The fact is, you have to play the hand you’ve been dealt, no matter how awful the cards may be.

I hope you’ll come back throughout this week to find out the other life lessons that chronic pain have taught me.