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⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.
Please remember I suffer with severe cognitive dysfunction this may be a confusing read. some AI written content
Living with MS Through Inner Strength, Cannabis & Dark Humor
Good afternoon fellow humanoids and N H I , Well, what can I say? Let’s get one thing out of the way early, before anyone suggests resistance bands or tells me to “just keep moving” like I’ve secretly been hoarding the ability to stand up for dramatic effect.
I can’t.
I’m in a power chair. That’s not a metaphor, not a bad day, not a phase I’ll stretch my way out of. That’s the situation. Full stop. So when people ask what physical therapy I do, there’s always this awkward pause where I decide how polite I feel like being. Sometimes I smile and deflect. Sometimes I think, ah yes, I’ll just hop out and jog it off, shall I?
So no, my life isn’t built around physio routines or carefully curated gym sessions. My therapy looks nothing like the glossy leaflets. And yet, strangely enough, it works.
Not in the “miracle cure” sense. Let’s not get ridiculous. MS doesn’t pack up and leave because you’ve found inner peace and a decent strain of cannabis. But surviving it? Living with it without losing your sense of self? That’s a different game entirely.
And that’s where my version of therapy lives.
The Myth of the “Right Way” to Cope
There’s this unspoken expectation that chronic illness should come with a kind of noble discipline. You’re meant to fight it in acceptable ways. Structured ways. Ways that look good from the outside.
You should be:
- Doing your exercises
- Tracking your progress
- Staying relentlessly positive
- Inspiring others, preferably while smiling through obvious pain
And if you’re not doing those things, there’s a subtle implication that you’re… what, exactly? Not trying hard enough? Not coping correctly?
Here’s the truth: there is no correct way to cope with something that rewrites your body without your permission.
Some people find their footing in physical therapy. Good for them. Genuinely. If that works, hold onto it.
But for those of us whose bodies have other ideas, the battlefield shifts. It becomes less about movement and more about endurance of a different kind. Mental. Emotional. Existential, if we’re being dramatic about it. Which I often am.
My Therapy Isn’t Instagram-Friendly
My therapy looks like this:
Reading. Talking. Cannabis. Silence. Thought. A kind of quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.
Not exactly the stuff of fitness influencers.
But let’s break it down, because each piece matters more than it probably sounds on the surface.
Reading: Escaping Without Leaving
When your physical world shrinks, your internal one either expands or collapses. There’s not much middle ground.
Reading, for me, is a way of refusing to let the walls close in.
It’s not just entertainment. It’s survival. It’s stepping into other lives, other minds, other possibilities when your own body has decided to limit the map. Books don’t care if you can walk. They don’t care if your hands shake or your energy’s shot. They just open the door and let you in.
There’s also something quietly defiant about it. While MS chips away at certain abilities, reading sharpens others. It keeps the mind active, engaged, slightly dangerous.
And if I’m being honest, it’s also a good distraction from the absurdity of it all. Because sometimes the reality of living with MS is so ridiculous that if you stare at it too long without a buffer, you’ll either laugh or lose your mind. Preferably both, in moderation.
Talking: Not Just Noise
Conversation is another lifeline, though not always in the way people expect.
It’s not about constant chatter or forced socialising. It’s about connection that feels real. Honest conversations where you don’t have to pretend everything’s fine or package your experience into something digestible.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being misunderstood repeatedly. Talking to people who actually get it, or at least try to, cuts through that.
And sometimes, yes, it’s just about having a laugh. Dark humour, especially. If you can’t laugh at the situation, it starts laughing at you, and it’s got a much worse sense of humour.
There’s something grounding about saying the blunt, uncomfortable truth out loud. It takes the edge off. Makes it manageable. Turns it from something looming and abstract into something you can at least look in the eye and say, “Right, you again.”
Cannabis: Let’s Not Dance Around It
I use cannabis. THC, CBD, the lot.
There, said plainly, without dressing it up in euphemisms.
For some people, that’s controversial. For me, it’s practical.
It helps with pain. It helps with spasticity. It helps with the kind of background discomfort that never quite goes away but can be turned down from “constant screaming” to “annoying hum.”
It also helps with something less tangible but just as important: perspective.
There’s a softening that happens. Not a loss of clarity, despite what people assume, but a shift. The edges of everything become less sharp. The frustration, the anger, the sheer unfairness of it all doesn’t vanish, but it stops dominating the room.
It creates space. And when you live with something like MS, space is valuable.
No, it’s not a cure. It’s not magic. But it’s a tool. And I’ll take every useful tool I can get.
Natural Rhythms and a Bit of Witchcraft
I describe myself, half-jokingly but also not, as a natural Wiccan.
Not in a performative sense. I’m not out in the woods casting elaborate spells under a full moon, though that would at least make for a better story.
It’s more about a mindset. A way of relating to the world that isn’t purely clinical or mechanical.
Living with MS can make your body feel like a broken machine. Something that’s malfunctioning, unreliable, frustrating. The medical model reinforces that. Everything becomes symptoms, treatments, management strategies.
Necessary, yes. But incomplete.
What I lean into is something more intuitive. Energy. Calm. Intention. The idea that even if my body isn’t cooperating, I can still shape my internal environment.
Call it mindfulness if you want to sanitise it. I prefer something with a bit more character.
It’s about creating moments of stillness that aren’t empty but full. Where you’re not fighting your body or resenting it, just existing alongside it.
Some days that looks like quiet reflection. Other days it’s just sitting there, breathing, thinking, “Well, this is what we’ve got. Let’s work with it.”
There’s a strange kind of strength in that. Not loud or visible, but steady.
Stillness Isn’t Weakness
This is probably the biggest misconception.
If you’re not moving, not actively doing, not visibly pushing forward, people assume you’ve stopped. Given up. Settled.
But stillness can be an act of defiance.
When your body limits your movement, choosing not to let that define your entire existence is a form of resistance. You’re still here. Still thinking, feeling, observing, adapting.
Strength doesn’t always look like action. Sometimes it looks like endurance. Sometimes it looks like sitting in a chair and refusing to disappear, even when everything’s telling you it would be easier to fade into the background.
There’s nothing passive about that.
Dark Humour: The Unsung Therapy
Let’s talk about humour, specifically the darker variety.
Because if you’re dealing with something like MS and you don’t develop a slightly warped sense of humour, I don’t know how you cope.
There’s an absurdity to the whole situation that practically demands it.
Your body does something ridiculous. You respond with, “Brilliant, love that for me.” Not because it’s actually brilliant, but because the alternative is constant outrage, and that’s exhausting.
Dark humour creates distance. It lets you acknowledge how bad something is without being completely consumed by it.
It also tends to weed out people who can’t handle reality. If someone’s uncomfortable with you joking about your own condition, that’s usually a sign they’re more invested in their idea of your experience than the actual thing.
And frankly, life’s too short, even when it feels very long, to cater to that.
Blunt Truth: This Isn’t Inspirational
I’m not here to be inspiring.
That’s another expectation that gets quietly placed on people with chronic illness. That we should somehow turn our experience into something uplifting for others.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes there are moments of clarity, resilience, even a kind of rough beauty in how you adapt.
Other times, it’s just difficult. Frustrating. Boring, even. A long stretch of managing, adjusting, getting through the day.
And that’s fine.
You don’t need to turn your life into a lesson for anyone else. You just need to live it in a way that makes it bearable, maybe even meaningful on your own terms.
What Actually Keeps Me Going
At the center of all of this isn’t any one practice or habit.
It’s something harder to define. Inner strength, if you want a simple label, though that doesn’t quite capture it.
It’s more like a refusal.
A refusal to let MS strip away everything that makes me me. A refusal to be reduced to a diagnosis, a chair, a list of limitations.
The beliefs I hold, the way I see the world, the quiet rituals of thought and presence and, yes, the occasional chemically-assisted perspective shift, all feed into that.
It’s not neat. It’s not structured. It wouldn’t fit into a treatment plan.
But it works.
Final Thought, No Sugarcoating
If you’re looking for a tidy conclusion, something uplifting and neatly packaged, this isn’t that.
Living with MS isn’t tidy.
But it is livable.
Not by following someone else’s blueprint, but by building your own, piece by piece, out of whatever works. Even if it looks unconventional. Especially if it does.
So no, I don’t do physical therapy.
I do something else entirely.
And it keeps me here.
Which, all things considered, is a solid result.
so I'm sending you all out there peace-healing love and light, no matter whom or whatever you are, or wherever you are in this world.
Warlock Dark Chronic illness survivor, truth-teller, occasional bastard. From My Living Hell (For those who came here by accident: yes, my living hell is real. And yes, we still fight. Every shitty day. With defiance.)
