Finding the hope

I seem to be spending a lot of time crying just now, not something I want to do but something that I have to do. I am not normally the type of person who wallows in self pity, but to be honest it is more grief than pity. I have for to long been convincing myself that I carried off an award worthy act of everything is OK, this is my reaction to learning that my act was fooling few and some not at all. As creatures we really do think to highly of our abilities to fool the world, when in fact the only person we are truly fooling is ourselves, well that broke down, so what the world moves on and this is a new day. See I can say it, do I believe it, well yes and no. I believe it in that it is a fact, but I don’t believe it, when the tears start again.

I have had some wonderful comments and messages both here and on Twitter and I thank all of you for what you have said and if any of you doubted that I would rip the pain from inside me and slam it down in words, well I hope you have lost those doubt, there is nothing that I won’t pass on to those who will read, otherwise what would be the point of doing any of this. This is day three of trying to put myself back together and I am getting there, yes there are still tears but there is also a relief that I have at last been forced to look at myself as I am now and put to bed the idea that I can some how claw my way back to who I was just 2 or 3 years ago, if not who I was 10 yrs ago. It is the old me that I am grieving for because I now see she has truly gone and can never return. This stage of my illness is a hard one and I doubt if it will be the last time that I put myself through this, yes I do realise it is me that is the root of this, not anyone else, everyone else saw the truth and politely worked with it.

It is mad how much we can upset ourselves, and how much of our lives is spent trying to hide from what all other know. The simplest example of one we all do it the kidding ourselves daily when we look in the mirror to the fact we are growing older or that we have put on some weight, I was kidding myself about everything. I know I had written before about loss of concentration and so on before but I had sugar coated it, the stark reality was to hard for me to take, so I built a world that let me ignore it and hid. I am now standing outside that world and facing the one that everyone can see and has listened to for years.

I accepted years ago that I can’t escape this house, that this is the space I have to live in and there is nothing else available to me. Now I am having to accept that I can’t escape this body or mind either, there is nothing else available. I have cried less this morning and I feel stronger in myself, more able to see a way through if you like. Today has started with a more positive feel to it, a feeling of being myself who ever that is, but I suppose it might not be as bad as I feared, after all I don’t actually have much of a choice do I.

Finding Understanding

I didn’t realise yesterday a I wrote just what I was stirring up. The way I write really is a flow system, I start with a few selected sentences and I just run onward until there are no more for that day. It is I suppose a little haphazard but it works for me and I find that it forces the truth as I haven’t sat and worked out what to say, so only the truth can come out with ease. Just sometime though I start my mind working on what I can only explain as an area that I subconsciously had locked away, those things that we know but without a conscientious decision don’t want to think about. That is the danger I suppose of what I am doing, I am opening up my world and my very self in every way to everyone, including myself. I allowed my writing to open a door and my attempts to shut it, haven’t actually worked.

I have been thinking more about what is happening to me and how those slow steps down can be managed as much as possible to keep my life steady. I realise having thought about it, that I was naive to think that just as I have had a series of major events that change everything, that all of what MS will do to me, will be just like that. When I look at just the last year there has been a steady downwards slope that I have been traveling along with considerable ease. But that is because I have been lucky. I have the three parts of my that I see as the most precious intact enough to live my life within the boundaries of my happiness. I still have enough of my memory and mind power to think and write and understand. OK even that has changed due to my concentration problems but ‘I’ am still here. I still have enough eyesight to enjoy my world and enough to use of my hands to be able to type and operate my PC. The third is my hands without them well the PC thing would go. I see those three areas as essential to living a fulfilling life for me, I have lost so much else that these are the minimum requirement to maintain my happiness.

What has changed in the last year in brief are things like my mobility, my digestion and bowels, the pain levels in my legs and pelvis, my concentration and my trigger touch emotions, the stuttering and word lose. All of these are clearly in the progressive changes list, they have actually slowly continued to get worse, they are the drip drip things and the things that I had some how locked into the section I call normal. That is what I have been doing, hiding them in a tag that they don’t belong in because that way I didn’t have to think about it. If I just take one say my emotions, a year ago I only ever found myself bursting into tears when someone else said or did something trivial and instead of being angry or annoyed or even happy I would start crying, now, well now I can do it to myself, I can be writing or watching TV and totally inappropriately I will start to cry. It is always crying never laughter just tears, mind you laughing out loud when there is nothing funny might be more embarrassing than a few tears.

I think I have been hiding the truth as I just don’t want to see it for what it is. I was about to say, ‘I don’t understand why’, when I had a brick strike me between my eyes. It is so blindly simple, a major change is a challenge, I can apply myself to it and look for solutions because I can quantify it, I know exactly what I am up against, but how do you fight or quantify something that take weeks of slow change without being able to see it as that, the difference from yesterday to today is so tiny that it may be no change at all. I can’t look ahead of it, as I don’t know exactly where it is going, or what and how it will change. I can’t find solutions, as what exactly am trying to fix, how do you follow something that is untrackable.

Conclusion, progression is a bitch! It has also answered something else for me, I have a long term project that I have been planning for ages but I keep finding reasons why not to start yet, I now see why. I’m scared that the progression may beat me before I get to the end, as I just don’t know how much time I have before that concentration, or my hands or any other part of my stops me for ever. I am comfortable with blogging as it is daily, it starts and ends each day, but my dreamed of book hasn’t happened, as I don’t know if I will ever be able to finish it and I hate starting something and not finishing.