According to many reliable sources, i.e. mostly rando blogs on the internet, the five most stressful life events are the following:

• Death of a loved one
• Divorce
• Moving
• Major illness or injury
• Job loss

I can attest to at least three of these life events now that I’ve nearly completed my move from my 100-year-old home of 21 years that had me trapped inside its walls for around 18 months as my multiple sclerosis progressed at mind bending speed, to a 15-year-old home that is almost completely accessible in every way my old home was not.

I’m not going to tell you which of the two most stressful life events I’ve not yet experienced because if you know me at all, and by now you probably do due to my fairly regular commitment to over-sharing, you know that I have become extremely superstitious about putting things like that in writing or saying them out loud. This superstition started when I became a sudden widow at the age of 30 and became more entrenched since my late-ish in life diagnosis with MS. The Universe seems inclined to fuck with me that way and I’m not trying to sign up for more stressful life events just now. And no. It doesn’t count if you make it really easy for someone to figure it out anyway.

But wait. I was talking about my recent move.

My brain is pretty much mush at this point in the move process and my fingers continue to give me typing challenges so writing has been doubly difficult. I’ve been so focused on just getting through each day in one piece that has pretty much taken all of my available energy.

But today? Today felt like a turning point that gave me some much needed perspective on just how massive this undertaking has been and how huge a role my disease has played in my life these past five years. That happened too. My five year MSversary. The magical year I was told would be the time when this disease might finally take up fewer of my every waking moments. I was skeptical. I still am. But I might be seeing a light at the end of this tunnel that for once doesn’t look like an oncoming train.

That, however, doesn’t mean that my ungrateful ass hasn’t despaired more than one time in the past few weeks since my release from that last 27 day inpatient hospital stay. I’ve felt so hopeless at various times that it felt like it might consume me. And I felt this hopelessness whilst sitting in this beautiful house with its beautifully accessible rooms and floors and doorways. I felt such shame, reader, I felt such amazing shame.

While I did blow my meager “retirement” savings that I acquired over the last nearly 30 years of working as an advertising executive whose primary goal seemed to be to work myself to death, the fact remains that I had that meager savings that didn’t pay for this house outright – not by a long shot – but it did help to make it affordable for me.

It’s not lost on me how fortunate I am. It’s not lost on me how many people I know and love who share this chronic illness life with me who are struggling without health insurance, without accessible housing and without jobs that make daily life even remotely livable. It’s not lost on me how grateful I should be even on my worst days but somehow even knowing that reality doesn’t stop me from hitting lows I didn’t think were even possible.

I left the hospital on December 9th and walked into this house for the first time ever. I bought the house sight unseen by way of some FaceTime calls that didn’t really prepare me for how weird it would be to come home to a place that didn’t feel at all like home. Not my home anyway. A nice home, sure, a very nice home no doubt but every inch of it was strange to me. Foreign. Almost sinister. How could wide open windows with views of snow covered trees feel sinister? What is wrong with me that this could happen?

I started my first days in my new house living in a guest room on the lower level where I have a couple of guest rooms and a living area where my roommate and general life helper, Maddi, has been living. I’ve written a little bit about Maddi here in the past but I’ll explain here again how “hiring” Maddi was the best decision I’ve made in a very long time.

Me. With a roommate. What? I’ve never had a roommate that I wasn’t married to or related to by blood. I’m a happy loner. I’ve lived alone for over twenty years and most of those years were blissful. Then came MS and all of the sudden I couldn’t trust my own self.

I never felt safe. I always felt at risk of dire happenings at any given moment. Falling. Not being able to get out of bed. Being stuck in a chair. The threat of not making it to the bathroom in time. The inability to walk out my front door and be sure I’d be able to walk back in. The fear of getting stuck on the stairlift mid-staircase when I was home alone. The list is endless of things I was deathly afraid of. Fear was my roommate before Maddi and Fear is a shitty ass roommate.

Maybe it was that fear that made me realize that walking into a brand new place that I’d only seen in pictures and video, all by myself, might not be the best idea.

And then there was Maddi.

She started out as my cat helper coming by my old house a couple of times a day to feed my cat Fred and scoop his litter box – things I couldn’t manage to do myself all of the sudden. Maddi loves cats as much as I do. She had a special little voice she used when talking to Fred. She called him “sir” and loved on him when I wasn’t able. It was a good gig for both of us. But there was something about Maddi that calmed me and I struggled to put my finger on it.

She’s positive where I’m known to be rather bleak. She’s calm where I tend to be a bit overwrought. She’s chill to a degree I don’t think I’ve ever achieved in all of my 53 years. She’s a millennial to my Generation X. On the surface of things we are polar opposites in a way that in any other situation might be deal breakers.

But there was more to our weird developing friendship. We’re both artists. We both like cats a whole lot. We both like to talk A LOT. We have similar taste in many things from clothes to food. There’s more than 20 years between us but we vibe like contemporaries. I don’t fully understand it, if I’m 100% honest but it’s just the way it is.

When I was holed up in that lower level bedroom struggling to stand up long enough to get my pants down when I had to pee, I felt the fear coming back in this strange new place. “Danger!” Screamed my brain. I felt so relieved to be out of the hospital and in this strange but beautiful new place but I couldn’t relax long enough to feel as positive as I yearned to feel.

I had to live in the lower level until the renovation was complete on my master bathroom. Then I learned I couldn’t wheel my chair across the super plush carpet in my master bedroom so all of the sudden I had to have a new hardwood floor installed. More time in the basement it would be.

The stairlift I had installed while I was in the hospital wasn’t quite right. I felt like I might fall off of it when I sat on it. The foot plate didn’t go down automatically and I couldn’t reach it to push it down myself so Maddi had to help me every single time I used the stairlift. Danger. Dependence. Ugh.

Danger had followed me to my new accessible house and I wasn’t prepared for it. It felt it like a hot coal in my belly. I looked out at the blanket of freshly fallen snow and wanted to rejoice at how beautiful it was. How gorgeous the views were from my beautiful big windows! But I couldn’t get there. Danger was in my belly and wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I willed it to go.

Maddi pulled off a straight up miracle getting this house ready for me to come home to. Somehow there weren’t boxes everywhere. Somehow she managed to set up the kitchen so it was ready to go the day I rolled in the front door. There were clear paths for me to roll through the whole main floor. Furniture was in the right places. It was some kind of miracle. But that is what Maddi does.

She’s a helper. A problem solver. A positive thinker. Everything I am not these days. She tried to talk me down from the ledge daily and nightly. “It’s just the first few days, pretty soon you’ll be living upstairs and things are going to be awesome for you,” she’d tell me.

I tried to believe her, I really tried hard. But that hot coal in my belly just burned away day after day. The best thing about Maddi? She didn’t give up on me and my little black rain cloud demeanor. She didn’t throw her hands in the air and walk away from my sad sack obsessions. She kept up the pep talks no matter how dark I tried to go.

She never told me to just stop it and be more fucking grateful already. She understood. Things can look perfect in pictures and even in real life but under the surface is still the monster waiting to rear its ugly head and ruin even the most perfect of situations.

Once I finally was able to move my sleeping recliner to the first floor and live up there I had a couple of super happy days but then it hit me again. This time it hit me because I couldn’t seem to get myself into my new bed. It was too high off the ground. Maddi helped me get up there one time but it wasn’t pretty. I tried to hoist my butt on to the mattress but as soon as my butt hit the surface I began to slide off. “I’m falling, I’m falling! Push me backwards NOW,” I wailed. And she did push me backwards so that I fell on the bed flat on my back. And then I couldn’t move because my entire body went both stiff and weak all at the same time.

I wanted to sleep in that bed so badly! But it would be the sleeping chair for me until I could figure out how to solve the bed problem. It felt like failure. Again. Tears. Doom and gloom. A panic about the basic truth that I have a quickly progressing disease and maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to sleep in an actual bed again. Why did I buy this house with the beautiful master bedroom if I couldn’t even sleep in the goddamn bed?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my earliest days in this amazing new house weren’t that great and it made me feel like a horrible ungrateful ass. How could I have all of this and still be so afraid? How could that even happen? What had I done?

Here’s what Maddi taught me in those early days. This was just the beginning. Phase one, if you will. Yea there were problems but we could solve them. We had time. We could fix what needed fixing and look forward to phase two and phase three when I’d have a bed I could sleep in and a stairlift that didn’t feel deadly and Beth-level organization in a house that just felt like somebody else’s house to me.

When I’d break down and cry, Maddi would tell me that was exactly what I should be doing. This sounded foreign to me. Strange. I’d spent my life trying to be superwoman strong. I wasn’t supposed to be crying when I’d supposedly gotten everything I’d been hoping for. But it turns out that I don’t know a whole lot about letting feelings happen as feelings will. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to ignore them! Now here was this person living in my house with me telling me to let those feelings fly. And I didn’t want to throttle her. How was this even possible?

So I’m still sleeping in the sleeping recliner in my living room. My slimmer mattress doesn’t arrive until January 8 but somehow I’m Ok with that. Every day we inch closer to phase two (the phases are loosely outlined but phase two begins when I have a bed I can actually sleep in). Who knows what happens in phase three! But I’m looking forward to it.

I’m also learning that tears are gonna fall. We’ll have to move the grab bars in my beautiful new bathroom as many times as it takes for me to get it right. The ceiling fans will be replaced. The dead stink bugs that are inside my gas fireplace will eventually burn up. My favorite art will finally go back up on the walls. And the kitchen will be set up so it’s easier for me to do things more independently – it will all come to pass. I just need to be patient. And let the tears fall when they want to fall.

The funniest part of this whole adventure is the drama of the Freds. See, Maddi also has a cat called Fred. He’s a four year old tuxedo with a little white mustache that sometimes looks like smiling teeth to me. He’s adorable but rambunctious. My Fred, or OG Fred as I like to call him, is sixteen years old and over everything. He just wants to be an only child again. He just wants to rule the house like the drama king that he is and here’s this little guy with the mustache who wants to play in the worst way. There is hissing and growling. Occasional swatting. Then the hour comes when Maddi goes to bed and Lil’ Fred gets locked in her room for the night and we all get some peace until the morning when the whole thing starts over again.

I’m not sure what phase it will be when the Freds finally work it out. I hope it happens before Maddi moves to Seattle in the spring. But if it doesn’t, we’ll work it out. It seems that some of Maddi’s chill has accidentally rubbed off on me. Just that very teeny tiny bit.

It’s a constant windy road this MS journey. The goods days are looking more promising. The bad days are relentless no matter how accessible and pretty your new house might be. It’s one step forward and two steps back and then three or four steps forward again just when you think you don’t have any steps left.

I feel grateful. And lucky. And cursed. And overwhelmingly #blessed. All at the very same time. But I’m finally beginning to feel like I might be home sometime soon.