Fighting Change

Well here it is day one and already have an extra hour freed up as I usually wouldn’t even be at this point by now, 10:30 and starting my post is really early. Strange thing is though I am find it hard to push myself into not fiddling with things as I have this inbuilt part of me saying it’s OK no need to be in a hurry you have loads of time to spare. I suppose though once I have the new routine settled in my head that will vanish.

I had forgotten that this weekend and today are the September weekend, a local holiday which means my work has an accompanying sound in Adam snoring on the settee, that isn’t holding me up in anyway just putting me off as I keep thinking I have to wake him it’s Monday and he shouldn’t be here. His working week is one of the few things that keeps me on track with what day of the week it is, so he is adding to the feeling that things are just wrong today and not what I am used to. It amazes me just how much we are creatures of habit and how trying to change those habits is really hard. I suspect this is why most people when they have a holiday leave their homes and go somewhere else, stay at home and you continue as before, go somewhere new and you have no normal to base anything on so different is all that is possible. I used to always think I didn’t like holidays due just to the boredom factor, but I think also there is a big splash of MS being happiest when it know where it is and what it is doing at each minute of the day. Holidays mean being scarred a lot of the time, as it means not knowing when or where anything is or will happen.

I have noticed over the years that anyone who has any type of brain damage all seem to need routine and order. My Aunt worked with children with Downs Syndrome and I went to the school to help out on every Thursday afternoon, I had had Glandular Fever and wasn’t allowed to do any Sport for six months this meant I couldn’t take part in the weekly hockey, tennis and the rest of the things I hated, so arranged instead of just sitting their watching, to being allowed to help out in my Aunts school instead. I learned a lot in those afternoons and loved the time I was there as I had had like most, no contact with people like them, I don’t think there was one that I didn’t fall in love with and I remember their faces to this day. I also remember seeing in them a more extreme version of many things I see in myself now, add on my experience in the mental hospital I was in for a couple of months and what I have seen on TV and all of that knowledge tells me that it is a universal effect of brain damage. We can’t deal with anything that isn’t exactly the same as it always is. I don’t know what it is or why but there seems to be that universal fact, routine, normality, order are all required to maintain that feeling of safety. I suppose a Neurologist or a psychologist would be able to answer why we need it and why our minds freakout when it is changed, the more the brain is damaged the more it becomes important.

So what I am saying is I am once again in the two brain situation, part of me is fighting like made to keep normality, the past, the other half is pushing to make the change, it is also really odd being able to feel like an observer aware of all of it, all. Sometimes I think it would be easier on me if I couldn’t sit here and observe what is happening, just letting it happen and it is a strong temptation believe me. I have now managed to sit wondering for 40 mins which isn’t constructive activity no more time to fritter, this is and will be the start of the new even if I still want to drift back into yesterday.

Number 42

Adam and I spent part of the weekend sorting through old photos that I don’t think I have looked at in the past 10 years. At some point in the past I had collected them together and formed montage boards with them. We carefully relieved them from the sellotape and spray mount that held them behind their glass panels, then Adam took them to his sisters to scan them for me. I have never had a printer or scanner, simply because there is a fact that many of us miss, why do we keep printing things that can be seen on screen without wasting ink, paper, power and money. Apart from a very resent need for a scanner, my opinion on that hasn’t changed.

I sat this morning going through the results and cropping where needed. I know that my mother has no pictures of me as a child, so I can only assume that this means that the few I found are all there is left now. Is it my age or theirs that has caused my past to now be turning sepia?

I could only be a few months old in this picture and I know nothing about it at all. I can only guess that as I did when my daughter was born that my parents took picture to send to everyone. The invention of photography really changed the way we mark events in our lives.

Yet chubby toddlers go on forever. Well these days they seem to go on forever, I remember it being called puppy fat, luckily for me it was but I remember always feeling on the large size, something that could have been caused more because I was 5ft 8ins by the age of 11 and all my school friends were smaller than me.

We had assembly every morning before lessons began. The whole school would be there, from what they now call primary 1 through to six form. On several occasions I was told off by the headmistress for talking or eating a sweet. I always felt very picked on, I knew I wasn’t the only one but I was always the one that was caught, then came the day of enlightenment, I noticed something that had escaped me until then. Everyone in front of me were smaller, just as they should have been, they were all younger than me, I already knew I was the tallest in my class, but for some reason that day I looked behind me. They were also all smaller than me, including most of the sixth form!

That day was quickly followed with another fact that had escaped my childish mind, I was taller than most of my teachers as well and if I just stood-up properly and didn’t slouch it turned the table of power. I could walk away, not only with my head held high, but without being told off for what ever petty school rule I had infringed. I found my height and rapidly over the next few months grew into it, racing from child to adult with no breathing space for understanding.

For many years I thought that I had missed out on something, that there had been an important step in life, that if I could only go back to I would be able to make more sense of life. I missed nothing, we all get there, we all do it differently and we all keep looking for the answer to questions that really don’t matter.