I heard the kindest words today...

I was speaking with someone about how much I have changed. The greatest concern I have with the MS is how very much it has affected my mind. The shear amount of cognitive dysfunction that I am faced with oft threatens to overwhelm me. So I ignore the sum and try to deal with small doses.

For example, I have written about my decision to stop worrying about my signature. Writing by hand is difficult, cursive is near impossible. Between remembering how words are spelled and letters are formed, I make a tremendous amount of mistakes. I would get so upset when I misspelled my name or when I couldn't form the letters. Then one day it struck me that most likely few people would ever really care about my signature. I could fret during the refinance, but elsewhere any scrawl would do.

But more important than struggling to write by hand is the realization that I have poor impulse control. My brain is not working well in that department and this issue colors not only my life but my personality, or at least how people can perceive me.

I grow agitated when I am confused and feeling threatened by that confusion. I become short with those who try, to help me to try to lead me to a solution. All I want is out of the situation and can see or understand little beyond my overwhelming desire to leave, to run away, to escape my confusion.

Sometimes I am concentrating so hard on the simplest of things that I literally do not hear questions posed to me. This past weekend, I hurt my best friend's husband's feelings because he asked me the same question three different times and I never answered him. He was asking if I was going to visit his family with them on Sunday. An important question. An answer that meant a lot to him. And there I was, completely unaware that he had asked me a question even once. Time after time after time. I was near horrified when he told me that I had ignored him.

I could go on, but the sum is too much for me to swallow at any one time. I struggle with the loss of who I was, of my rather fine brain that is now filled with holes and pitfalls.

Anyway, I was telling this person that a friend who is a clinical social worker translated much of what I am battling into clinical terms. It was sobering and yet freeing at the same time. But it was also sad. I miss who I was. I sometimes do not like who I am. I struggle with God's sovereignty in this area, in this path He has chosen for me to walk. I trust Him. I do revel in the knowledge that I stand in grace. Yet I sometimes, lately, as I stand by and watch my mind seem to slip away ever so slowly, I find myself engulfed in sorrow for that which I have lost and fearful anger for I feel as if few truly hear me when I try to say how very much I have changed...and still am changing. How very many plans and aids I've gathered around me to compensate...to cover...to hide that which I have lost.

So...I told this person about how I wished she could have know that me. And her rather quick response was that she liked who I am now, that who I was then didn't matter to her.

Would that she could understand how very much her response means to me...