I Am Enough

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. My name is Jayson Sacco and I'm your host and I hope everybody is doing fantastic. I wanted to go over a couple of emails that I got. Both of them are really cool. The first one is from Alex Levine and Alex has a fitness channel and in the shownotes I’ll have a link to his website. And in it, he wrote to me,

“Hi, Jayson, I just wanted to reach out and tell you that I enjoy the podcast. I have AS and I work as a personal trainer specializing in training others with AS. I just did an event with the Spondylitis Association of America, discussing health and fitness. It's nice to connect with others who are sharing similar experiences, keep on doing the good work.”

And just as I said, I'll have a link to both Alex's website in the show notes, as well as his Facebook page where you can find that event that he did with the Spondylitis Association of America. It’s a very good watch. The second message that I got was from a listener in the Faroe Islands. I hadn't been overly familiar with this country. It's basically located right in between Norway and Iceland and is part of Denmark but it's also I think its own country is the way they they officially look at themselves. But anyway, it's called the Faroe Islands. And I had saw some downloads coming in from there and I was like, that is really cool. I got this short little email but it was really fantastic to get and it was from a gentleman name, I think I'm saying this right Terji Beder, yeah, I think is how you say it. And I apologize for butchering that. And it says,

“Greetings from the Faroe Islands. I just wanted to thank you for hosting this podcast. I feel like there's a lot of information, content missing on AS on the Internet, or really anywhere. This is a great contribution with great quality. I love how you can make so many episodes and still managed to keep the topics original and with not much repetition. Great work. Sincerely, Terji.

Thank you so much. It's listeniers like you and everybody else that I hear from that I do this. And I really again, I love hearing from everybody. So if you're out there, please send me messages. I'll most likely unless you tell me not to read them on the next episode I read and then I respond back to everybody. I really enjoy receiving all these messages. It's just fantastic. So with that said, let's do a couple of quick housekeeping things, please go to spondypodcast.com, where you can sign up for the newsletter or use the Contact feature to reach out to me. There's also a section in there where you can go to access if you want to get a Spondypodcast t shirt or a couple of other items that are used to help support the show, or even just going to buy me a coffee calm where you'll find a link on the website to help support the show. Everybody has done that so far. Thank you again so much and I really appreciate it.

Now on to todays show. I received an email today that was a solicitation for a website I belong to, and the title of it was, You Are Enough. And I saw that and I looked at it and it said, being you is more than enough. And I started thinking about that, as you know, we have this chronic illness, this chronic disease. There's many, many times that we all look and say, why me, I miss what I could do. You know, I really am tired when I tried to clean the house for the day. I have done every one of those and so I'm not picking any one particular person. But I started thinking and I said, is that really fair to us? Nobody I've ever talked to with Ankylosing Spondylitis has ever said, I asked to get Ankylosing Spondylitis. It's like any disease that somebody has, It just is what it is. And you have to work to overcome and move around it. So I started thinking a little bit you know, they had a couple of...