Stanley is my cane. I dubbed him Stan upon looking upon him for the first time. I use his more formal name when I’m displeased with him. You see, I never use Stanley because he’s kind of frail and not very reliable. But when it arrived, this new more stable foot for Stanley, it changed all that. The new foot for Stan is so much better than the little one I used to have. It feels more stable and more like I will be less likely to kill myself using Stan, so I may use him more. I may actually stop stumbling around without support when there’s no handy friend, family, wall or grocery cart to hang on to. It also makes Stan able to stand on his own without me holding on to him (independence is important to me in a man). It’s a good thing in all ways. Well. In most ways, really.

Such a good thing got me to thinking. As you know, that’s never a good sign. According to my Precious Cheryl, therapist to the stars, I think way too much. Certain old ex-boyfriends might agree. When I get to thinking, there’s not a force in the universe that can get me to stop.

Let’s use an enormous hyperbolic cliche of a sentence starter, here, to describe what my new cane foot got me to thinking about: My descent into a brand new, much smaller life continues. With no end in sight.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. Sometimes I feel completely OK with it. Sometimes I look around my new smallish life and I think, “Well, the truth is, this isn’t half bad at all. I have a nice place to live, I have snuggly cats that I love, family & friends that are crazy awesome and more than enough of most things I need.” None of that can be categorized as anything near bad.

Other days, I look around my new smallish life and I think, “What the mother fuck has happened to me? How can I find any joy in this existence? How can I accept the fact that there is more that I can’t do than I can on most days? How can I become OK with the fact that there are more days than not that I am un-showered, wearing comfy clothes (again) and not a stitch of make up and I truly don’t give a fuck? How can I live a life that is so very antisocial? I will miss people. I will miss laughing and drinking and dressing up to go out. I will miss it all.”

It’s all very dramatic and complicated and lets just face it, not terribly healthy. For once, I have experienced a turn in this life that I have literally no idea how to deal with. That’s also not entirely true since I felt much the same way the day I was told Chuck was taken to the hospital after collapsing at work. We all know what happened after that. I didn’t know what to do with myself after all of that insanity either and I behaved astonishingly badly but somehow life went on and so did I. This experience is so much the same and so much different. It has completely boggled my mind, plain and simple.

I had my two year MS-versary on December 1 and it came and went without much fanfare. I had to actually look back in my journal to see what day it was that my actual diagnosis came and there it was. December 1, 2015. I remember the holidays that year being in a Solumedrol-induced haze. My first time on the ‘roids. How grateful I was earlier that week to hang out, in a hospital, with one of my oldest friends from high school who came with me to the three-day outpatient infusions. I remember laughing, like not a single minute had gone by since last we laughed, when in reality it was more than 25 (closer to 30) years since we’d done so for three days in a row. I remember how she ran around the hospital looking for Lifesavers when the Solumedrol gave me that nasty metal taste in my mouth, also for the very first time. They were butterscotch Lifesavers and they were perfect.

On Christmas Eve a few weeks later, I wore green shoes with kitten heels (Fluevog of course) with a simple, swingy black dress (the harbinger of uniforms to come) and bare legs. It was unseasonably warm in 2015 in December and I remember being grateful that I didn’t have to navigate through snow. I remember putting on makeup before heading out with my giant bags full of gifts and thinking how everything felt the same but also completely different.

I can’t remember last year much at all. I guess I’ll need to go back to ye good old journal to see how I was feeling on Christmas 2016 but I don’t remember feeling very festive. Or maybe I did and I’m just projecting my 2017 melancholy on to that holiday memory.

Lately, I find myself uncomfortable around other people. I find myself wanting to be normal and not coming close. I find myself wanting to enjoy myself and laugh and be with friends and family – and at the same time, I find myself a fish out of water in nearly every one of those situations. Grasping for the strength or will or whatever it is that will make me feel anything like any of these people I used to know so well and at the same time trying not to let anyone see me grasping at anything at all.

In my old life, I could enjoy myself in pretty much any group of people. I loved being around people, being social, doing my social thing. Don’t get me wrong…there were just as many times that I felt outright antisocial back then, too, but I had the uncanny ability to fake it. These days, though, I don’t feel like I could even fake faking it right now. I’ve tried it a couple of times so far this season – like for my office holiday lunch and gift exchange – where I had such a terrible day physically speaking, the pain so intense, that I could barely focus on acting festive.

I felt like a bitter, sad, broken woman sitting in the corning flashing her best fake smile around a room of happy, healthy, festive people. That smile of mine probably looked more like a grimace and I knew it. I could feel it. I kept at the act for most of the party until I sneaked out when I reached the point where I couldn’t even sit without feeling pain. It made me feel like a failure as I stumbled to my car, just across the street to the hotel where I’d valet parked just a couple of hours earlier.

I read a lot this year. Thirty-three books so far. That’s one helluva lot of books. It will probably be 35 or 36 before the year is actually over. I read so much because it keeps my mind busy and away from thoughts about what’s to come. I also read so much because I just love reading. I resent this disease for intruding on my favorite things and somehow making them bad to me now. Things like staying home, being cozy, reading books and writing. I did all of those thing before my diagnosis and they felt good. Now they feel like giving up.

I’m going to tell myself what I usually do at this point in a time of so much discontent and that is simply this: it can’t last forever. It will get better. Things will even out or they won’t and my new cane foot that feels more stable will give me the ability to get out of my house (and my head) even on a bad day so I can accept whatever I need to accept and not give up. A stable cane foot can make all the difference, is what I’m telling myself today. It’s a little thing, but maybe it will help. Maybe something will help. Maybe something will change. Maybe I will change. But for the better, this time.

It’s all so cliche! Major life changes after a cataclysmic diagnosis (this felt at the time and continues to feel cataclysmic though it should probably not feel as such. I mean, there are lots worse things). Events such as this, though, typically create melancholy that runs its course at its own speed until it peters out into some kind of begrudging positive thinking that feels more like lying than anything else. But it’s better than feeling angry all of the time so one tends to give in.

I used to think about how lucky I am that this disease hit me after I had such an amazing time in my earlier life. How this disease hit me after I’d traveled, did impulsive things, lived for decades as an unfettered adult without a care in the world because I had no idea what was to come and I just wanted to enjoy it. That time I took a year off work and just…painted. And sewed and wrote in my journal. Those trips I took with my friends to tropical places. Those trips alone to various other places. Paris and Florence and Denmark and London.

How lucky I am that I had so many drunken happy hours when I laughed with my friends until we peed. The wins (and losses) in my crazy career in advertising. The men, mostly boys, who I allowed into my life, sometimes only to break my heart, until I booted them out again when I started to yearn for solitude once again. Or they booted me out and I thought I’d die then I never did and things went back to normal again. I’ve lived. I’ve lived a lot.

I’m not sure I know how to live now. No! This is not me saying I don’t want to live (I promise you), it’s me saying I don’t know how to live.

I keep trying to figure out how and what will make this new life happy again. Simplify/get rid of unnecessary stuff (check). Change routines (check). Eliminate unnecessary obstacles, (mostly check). Get a uniform (done). Slow down (like I had a choice). Alter perspective (Um…working on it). Ask for help (check). Accept help (check). I’ve done all of the things! I’ve taken all of the advice. Even the advice I didn’t know to ask for.

We used to joke, my friends and I, when I would ghost every now and then and have a weekend or a day where I just caved up, did nothing, and luxuriated in my solitude. They would say, “You’re spending time with your favorite person, aren’t you?”

And I would chuckle. I sure was. And I didn’t even care who knew. It was occasional, after all, a much needed rest from trying to be the happiest, most free, most successful, most full-of-life person I knew. That shit was exhausting. Who wouldn’t need a break every now and then?

So now it’s a disease that’s making my life exhausting. I have no idea why the reason for the exhaustion has such an impact on how I think about how to deal with the exhaustion. I have no idea why it’s so hard for me to accept that this disease has given me the rare opportunity to live the life I thought I wanted to live – the life with unlimited time for my favorite person.

Maybe I haven’t figured out how to allow this new, broken somewhat less shiny person become my favorite again. I’m so busy picking her apart inside and out, I never get the chance to luxuriate. I never get the chance to just be…me. The only way to change any of this is for me to somehow fall in love with this new version of myself, the way I did such a long time ago after having my heart utterly annihilated by the latest guy to let me down. It took time then. And it’s taking it’s good old time now! I’m just as impatient with the process now as I was then.

Everything is the same. Everything is different. Time is the only answer. Fa-la-la-la-la and all of that rot.