How ME/CFS Taught Valeria to Become Her Own Friend

“I think anybody should be so lucky to get the chance to become their own friend.”

Valeria paused. She lives in Stuttgart Germany and has since the age of 5, only now she lives there with her husband, dog, and three cats. Recently, it’s taken on a whole new tone with her diagnosis of ME/CFS — a chronic, debilitating disease.

Although she jokes about not having a schedule these days, a stark difference from what she had been used to as a previous workaholic, she admits “it’s lonely”. For her, ME/CFS is a condition that is tied to emotions, both from now and long ago. It leaves her unable to work, unable to leave the house, and currently, unable to plan for the future. “[I] don’t live in the normal sphere of everyone you know. People go to work, people plan holidays, people plan for the future.” A once-familiar world that now feels like watching life through a window.

Back in 2019, she was working as a multilingual management assistant for a large bank in her area, and also a staff council member. For 20 years, the pressure and stress built incrementally, “it starts slowly,” she said, “you get into the stress and you get used to the stress”. The water turned just a little hotter, then a little hotter, until eventually “they had to pull me away from work, I wasn’t even able to do it.” The stress from the bank, from up holding her council position, from her “sometimes horrible bosses” that she knew were having a bad day based on the sound of their footsteps. Then it all came to a big rolling boil before she was removed. She thought she’d be back in three months, three months. She’s been gone for a year and a half.

Even with significant time away from work and the support of therapy, six months later she had crashed again. “It wasn’t the right time for me to go back,” she says, and she hasn’t returned to work since. It was at this point she was diagnosed with ME/CFS or chronic fatigue syndrome. An illness that affects the brain, immune system, neurological system, and overall energy production in the body, it’s a condition that varies widely from person to person and is generally considered to have no cure. 

“It was very difficult at first because you don’t know what it is,” she says. Valeria describes it as “the body telling you ‘listen to me’”. Despite what some might consider a life sentence, Valeria says she was lucky. Not only does she have a supportive husband, but “Other people have to go through years of medical attention that don’t help them, it is really difficult for them.” Searching for answers and support, Valeria came across a YouTube video from a woman named Raelan Agle who would become an important part of her healing journey. 

Raelan, a YouTuber dedicated to helping people find hope and help for their chronic illnesses, suffered from ME/CFS for over 10 years before finding a cure for herself. She is now dedicated to interviewing and sharing the stories of others who have done the same, and with a condition that varies so much from person to person, each cure and path of healing looks different too. Hundreds of videos, people from all over the world sharing their stories of how they learned to get better themselves, hours and hours of watching. A community for healing. 

It was through Raelan that Valeria and her husband found Rosebud, which as another tool in her arsenal, quickly became a safe space to vent, to talk, and to ask the questions she really needed to ask. “You come to a moment in this [healing] process where things come up…what conditioned you in life, what did you learn as a child, why do you come to be in a position where you can be a workaholic. What needs to happen so you don’t realize that you aren’t taking care of yourself to a degree where you get such a severe illness.” Forced to stop, Valeria’s body was screaming at her to listen. 

“If I get better,” she says, and pauses. She then corrects herself: “when I get better, I have to start from scratch.” 

With having to leave the entirety of her old life behind, Valeria finds community now where she can. Stuck to the confines of what her energy allows: online groups, Rosebud, and therapy — all which have been a part of her healing process. But it’s difficult for her. A lot of these online groups instill a strict no complaining policy or are all complaining which she says is far too sad for her to be a part of. While she has found them to be helpful in some ways, it is the release she finds Rosebud helpful for. 

“When I have to vent or find solutions, I have come to rely a lot on Rosebud,” she says. Not only does it help catalog her feelings, but she finds it helpful in being able to switch between languages. Speaking Spanish, German and English she says she often will rotate between languages in her normal speech, thought patterns, and now, in her journaling. She notes that it might be weird but, “it doesn’t matter, it’s my Rosebud.”

It is through community we heal, and with an illness that is so multi-faceted, Valeria uses a multi-faceted approach to tackle it. "I work with a healer who does Chinese traditional medicine, Ayurveda, and energy healing," she says, alongside her trusted general practitioner of 15 years. Despite all of her suffering, the seemingly endless search to become healed, she still says she is lucky. "My life has changed now, but I have the chance of life."

Through her healer, Valeria discovered Buddhist practices that opened new depths of understanding.“Having to think about death, it really brings you to depths you never knew you could go…it has helped me a lot.” With this structure of buddhism, she says Rosebud is able to remind her of the practices and ideals that have helped her already. “When I’m struggling and it’s really difficult, [Rosebud] always reminds me of Buddhist practices…and I’m so thankful for that.” 

She says that the more information she has shared with Rosebud, the more it feels that she is helping herself. The more she journals, the more she practices her breathing exercises, the more she shares, Valeria explains that “you get the answers, and the answers are practically coming from yourself - from the friend you need to be to yourself.” This all comes from a place where Valeria now feels that she can be more open and honest than ever before. Learning to become her own friend was not something Valeria expected but “it is inevitable and it’s necessary,” she says. Her eyes are clear, “because this is what you need to heal yourself.” 

For Valeria, learning to meet herself where she is now is not only a Buddhist mindset but one that Valeria believes is essential to her healing. “I think anybody should be so lucky to get the chance to become their own friend.”