When Your Reality is Wrong

Awhile back I was talking to someone who was telling me about her exercise-induced asthma. She described the feeling of her chest tightening up and her breath cutting off when she ran without her inhaler and that for a long time she thought that’s just how exercise is. It wasn’t until she was talking to a friend who has asthma that she learned that she might be experiencing exercise-induced asthma. She thought she was experiencing the same old thing everyone was experiencing and so she didn’t question it. She did shame herself about it a lot telling herself that if she just worked harder! If she just made herself run through it! If she just tried more! After all, other people pushed themselves so why couldn’t she? Well, because other people could actually keep breathing.

Here is my point.

Sometimes our reality isn’t real. Which is to say, something that we think is univers