I use the expression ‘staring down the barrel of a gun’ a lot.  I don’t know why.  I’m usually not referring to anything life or death.  Just the idea that in the moment, the choice I am faced with feels intense, imminent, incredibly important.  Life changing.

This year has been an interesting year for me.  A year of growth.  A year of grief and mourning.  A year of finding out how to be me without my mother.  It has been challenging.  Rewarding.  Dark.  Hopeful.  Endless and timeless all at once.  I think I both know myself better and don’t know myself at all.  I look in the mirror sometimes and I try to find something — anything — that lets me know that I’m choosing correctly.

Nothing ever comes.  Sometimes I sleep well.  Other times I don’t.  Sometimes I struggle with MS.  Sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes things feel as though they are beginning to make sense, and in the same instant, feel overwhelming, as though I am drowning and watching myself lose grip.

I have gone on interviews.  I have summoned enthusiasm for positions I never had any interest in — directions in life that inspire nothing but the knowledge that I am doing it to get it done.  I have toyed with graduate school – I have applied.  I have wondered what the long con is … what am I working on for what result some day in the future?

Everyone dies.  Right?  If I have learned nothing this year but that, then I have at least learned that.  When I walked down Walnut Street gripping Lydia with sweaty palms, counting the steps, the painful distance of two blocks from my office to the bank … I clearly understood priorities in a way I never did before.  And now, trying to find light in darkness, trying to hear my mother’s voice in a void of silence, I very acutely understand that no amount of love, no amount of wishes or morphine or crossed fingers will change the inevitability of death.

Cancer didn’t care that I needed her.  That my father needed her.  That my brother and her identical twin needed her.  Cancer couldn’t have cared less.  Cancer does not discriminate, it does not show rhyme or reason in its actions, in it’s insidiousness.

And so, nearly three years after leaving my job I sit here, wondering what the point of it all is.  And I talk to a man about a fascinating company.  And I wonder … why?  Why should I pursue that when I really have no interest.  Well, maybe not no interest, but my interest is fleeting at best.  It is superficial.

What should I be doing for the rest of my life … that when I close my eyes for the last time, gives me peace?  And … what can I do within the confines of multiple sclerosis? Tricky question to start, I know … trickier question to answer, given the variables.

I have tried to refresh this blog … so it doesn’t look like the space I created nearly nine years ago.  So it is a new space, where I can come, and scream into the void.  Talk about the things that bring me passion.  Wonder about the big questions for which I have no answers.  I can’t promise anything … I can’t promise daily blogs, or a cohesive thought pattern.  I can’t promise a theme.  But I can promise honesty.  I can promise that when I sit here, and type furiously and with intense focus, it will be the truth of who I am in that moment.  The truth of what I believe and what I am questioning.  Because I don’t really know how to be anything better than I know how to be honest.  (That has been a theme in my recommendations … and perhaps not always in a positive way).

xox, g