Finding a balance between fighting for a cure, fighting for better treatments and better ideas, or for accepting your reality as normal and moving on with life - this is an art!
I have seen both. I have been both! The one thing that I notice is that I seem to be generally happier when I am not expecting to find a better treatment or a cure. That's NOT to say that one should give up - by any means!
Sometimes, a cure is so far down the road, that pushing and expecting for that to arrive and change your life ends up making you more miserable. In many cases with autoimmune disease, researchers barely have a general understanding of what the disease is actually doing at all times. How do we find treatments and cures if we don't even understand the mechanism of the disease?
There are only so many things that we can do to influence this process. I, personally, try to participate and fundraise for several events throughout the year, every year, and I always allow any samples/bloodwork/results to be studied, I also love when there are med students who want to study my medical history. Apart from that, there is not much more that I, personally, can do to influence the rate at which better treatments or any cures are found.
If I kept in my head that life would just get better if they found a cure - if I kept waiting and expecting that one day my life will change, but until then I will be suffering, I think I would be absolutely miserable.
Instead - I like to think 'okay - this is my new normal. I will likely feel like this forever. So learn to live with it, learn to respect the pain and learn new limits, find what you can continue to do and what you can push yourself to do, but figure out what your new limits might be and learn to work around them.'...
There is no way I would be psychologically okay if I always thought that I can't be active now, but once they find a cure, I can be active again. So I'll just wait...?? I would much rather be active on any days that I feel possibly capable, and be inactive on days when I absolutely cannot.
This is the life I have been given. I will cherish every part of it - difficult or not. If a cure comes - AWESOME! But if a cure is not found, I still want to enjoy life.