Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Dreams are wonderful things when they allow us to sleep restfully and awaken with a new optimism, but some dreams are repeated over and over without any hope for immediate fulfillment.

Hope is important. Dreams are important. The two are forever linked in the minds of those with fibromyalgia.

I received a lovely note from Jenn at fibrologie.blogspot.com earlier today. I checked out her new blog and was thrilled to learn that we are in this together - same message, same fight, same page.

She commented in a post on her blog about how nice it would be to live just one day where "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt". It's her dream and has been for many years, yet she is only 21.

For those of us who are entering the "almost-senior-citizen" part of our lives, the dream of "nothing hurting" is a shared dream. We feel pain in our aging joints and tired muscles. The difference is that we just began dreaming this dream, we just recently recognized daily pain in our lives; for most of us this is new. We have lived the majority of our lives in painless oblivion. Life without pain is something teenagers with fibro cannot imagine.

But they can dream...and they can hope.

I hope Jenn's dream comes true, for her, for Kalen and for all teenagers and adults with fibromyalgia. But hope is not enough and that's why TeenFibro is coming into being, in the hope that we can work together to create better awareness, diagnosis and treatment of fibromyalgia, especially in teenagers.

I have a dream too.