The last few days have been just a little odd. I have been somewhat lost when it comes to holding onto reality, but I have quite clearly been brighter and more alive than I have been for a while. The two things don’t really belong together, but that’s chronic illness for you, illogical and odd beyond anything you ever imagined before you are actually living with it. Adam noticed the change a couple of days ago if I’m honest, I felt it starting a couple of days before, but it took time to build until it was obvious. I don’t get many of these bright and almost bouncy spells. They are a glimpse of the person I used to be. The person who in their thirties still did things like leapfrog over the bollards on Sauchiehall street in the middle of the shoppers on a Saturday afternoon. She was a person that I really liked, not lacking in energy, either physical or mental, not afraid to do silly things and living just to be happy. I know I was lucky, I know that not many people have that chance of a second life, but I did and I didn’t waste it. Sometimes I think that it was life telling me to make the most of it as it was all going to vanish all too soon. At the time I thought it was life making things right for the mess that my first life was. Either way, from 28 to 40 where the best years of my life and I lived them, every second of them.

I often find myself sitting here with a silly smile on my face as some odd memory that has jumped into my head from nowhere. I smile because I can remember the happiness of those days, the almost endless fun and surprised that were hidden in most days, spontaneity was my life and I loved it. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy now, it just means I’m lucky to have a brain that gives me gifts from my past even though that gift, will mean I don’t remember what I was doing before it appeared. Memory can be both a joy and a total pain in the neck at exactly the same time. I don’t have the energy these days to walk a tenth of the length of Sauchiehall Street, far less leapfrog over one bollard, but I am just as happy today as I was then. How I feel and how I appear don’t always match and that is mainly down to energy. It is almost impossible to be cracking jokes, be sarcastic or even show spontaneity when all you want to do is sleep, or your mind is so fogged that you can’t see the next word. Appearances can be totally false.

I know that I am not alone in being quite content with their lives despite what has happened to it. Despite large doses of self-analysis, I have failed over and over to work out what it is about me that lets me be happy with my life as it is. There is nothing that I would like more than to be able to write some kind of self-help manual that could transform others lives so they to could be housebound or even just chronically ill and happy. The reality I have had to accept is that it has far more to do with personality and upbringing than anything else. I am an accepting person. I was brought up to do, not question what I was given. I learned quickly to accept where I am or what was happening and just get on with it. The only time that I went against that was when I broke free of my first marriage. There were moments of happiness, but so few that it just wasn’t not enough. I had accepted far more than I could take from that situation. But beyond what I was taught, is me, my personality. Where I am now, actually feels like a version of spontaneity, just as quickly as I would go off on a tangent because it seemed like fun, I can also see things as a tangent on life, so why shouldn’t that be fun too. I am here, a fact written in stone that no one can change. If it can’t be changed, then accept it and make the most of it. It may sound simplistic, but often the simplest things are the things that work.

Those who have been reading for a while will know that I didn’t accept without a period of fighting against it. That was another of my personality traits, pig-headedness. It is also a trait that can work for me as well. Without it, I would have given up long ago, what is the point in fighting something that you can’t beat. The point is, you just might this time. A run of small wins is enough to lift anyone’s spirits. In this past week, I lost and won back a hand, I started to actually go to the loo and I have defeated the monster of a new website that seemed to have it’s instructions buried in an MS Fog. Small wins, enough to lift me and enough to add that spark of brightness to my inside and outside self. Happiness can come from the strangest places, but it’s still there. Life didn’t end when my front door closed behind me for that last time, it just changed. I can still laugh at myself, even on my worst days there are points that are funny and fun may not come in wild antics now, but it’s still there, just smaller and more controlled. I am still here, unfortunately not smaller, more sort of rounder, not just in shape but in more rounded as a person. There is still so much ahead of me to learn and explore. My physical world is limited to just two rooms plus utilities but it bigger in the range of things I need to know and will need in the future.

I believe that you, me and everyone can be happy. It’s a matter of taking your life, your world as it is and accepting, then if it needs to change, well change it. If you can’t find any happiness in where you are, why should you find it somewhere else? Without accepting what is yours, what is unchangeable, you can’t move anywhere or make anything better. It takes time, lots of time, but well we have loads of it, but if you are determined to keep living, determined to be happy, you will be. But nothing will change if your heart isn’t in it and if you don’t really try.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago – 25/07/2013 – Is there a way out

Sometimes I find myself with so many words inside me that I can’t see past them, through them or even around them, my head spins as I try to find out just what it is these dammed words are actually trying to tell me, or is it trying to tell you. After all it is the reader that words are really for, rather than…..