Today's been an off day for me. I didn't get much sleep and I've been trying to talk myself into doing things. It's mainly resulted in me fumbling around the apartment doing some light chores and eyeballing all the things I keep telling myself I need to get done.
I wish I could feel less guilty about lazy days...er...weeks, and take the time I need to get my spoons back before I try to take on the world, or even our tiny apartment again. It never works that way though. All I see are the things I should be doing, or should have gotten done by now. I expend so much energy fretting about trying to take care of me instead of it, that it would probably be easier and healthier just to do it. That is if my list wasn't impossibly long.
Everywhere I look is a project that should be getting done in the time I've spent hiding under the blankets. It's really hard to convince myself otherwise.
I know my body needs the time right now though. I'm sick, battling changes in steroids, and fending off a flare. If only the tiny voice inside my head would figure that out.
The cat's been wrestling with Daisy's bed in the kitchen for nearly an hour now. He stalks, pounces, and rolls around the kitchen with it repeatedly. I think he's practicing to murder me.
I went into the kitchen earlier for a drink and totally had my mind blown. It's known that we all experience the same reality in very different ways. Just ask a police sketch artist. In general though, we can expect that we will experience reality the same way time and time again.
When you have brain damage though, you might as well throw expectations out the window. My brain lies to me all the time about what reality is. It likes to tell me that the floor is moving, the room is swaying, some things are doubling, the list goes on and on. I regularly have to remind myself that it's just my brain playing tricks on me.
Today was definetely a new one though. Chris gets his work schedule monthly, printed out on a very basic Excel sheet. Black & White. Black boxes around every square of information, rows and columns. It can be a bit much to look at, so every month when he gets a new schedule I highlight his line of information in blue. It makes it a bit easier to read and breaks up the information. I hang his schedule on the fridge with a magnet, and copy it over onto our calendars.
So, I go into the fridge for a drink and his schedule catches my eye. The lines are rotated in alternating shades of yellow and white to break up the information! That's new, and it's about time! All white sucked to read. Except, there's my highlight of blue. This isn't a new schedule.
I stared at it dumbfounded for a few minutes. Took it off of the fridge and looked at it from different angles. There was definetely yellow on the paper. Yellow I had never seen before. And it's not that I just never noticed; I have complained about the uniform black and white of this particular piece of paper. I purposely highlight rows myself to break up the color for reading purposes. Yet here it was, with it's alternating color pattern in all its glory.
How the fuck does that happen?
It blew my mind for quite some time as I stood there looking at it. Hell, my mind is still blown. That I was entirely oblivious to a color scheme for months. That I somehow was able to see it today of all days.
Multiple sclerosis affecting my vision, perception of colors? Inflammation affecting my vision? Something that changed with the increase in my dose of steroids.
Perceptions of reality.
Trippy.
It isn't quite the first time this has happened. I owned a pair of earrings for months one time that I believed the crystal inside of was clear, only to realize one day that it was a light blue.
Has something similar like this ever happened to you? Does MS or RA change your perception of reality or colors?
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