What they don't tell you.

I've been waking up every morning and not recognizing the face staring back from the mirror.

My physical being has gone rogue. I don't recognize my face, my hair or my body. My bodily functions are alien to me.

I cried in public today. That's really not my style. I haven't cried in some time and to do it in public just made it more like a humiliating kick in the teeth rather than the painful punch in the gut it is in private.

The MS people talk a lot about symptoms and how to manage them but they don't tell you *why* you just want to stay in your house and never come out. It's not just the symptoms, I am now convinced of this.

It's the little embarrassments. It's the constant mental calculations of where you can go because every trip is a metric of distance + time + seating + washrooms. It's about the little stumbles, the lack of fine motor skills making it difficult to hold a pen, the small inabilities that just build up and up and up until the degradation brings you down and down and down.

It's the stares from strangers when they don't understand why half way down the block my left leg starts to drop or why I lose my balance trying to negotiate a curb. I'm not drunk and I'm not faking in order to ask for a seat on the bus.

It's all my old clothes and shoes mocking me from the closet. It's my wedding photo staring back at me on the wall. It's Marg's boots, Dianna's corsets, Sam's travels and Laurie's job.

But the thing that made me cry today was Speechless

Could we fix you if you broke?
And is your punch line just a joke?