Ladies and Gentlemen, we conclude this evening's entertainment with a short story, entitled "A Fairy Tale"

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away at all a little girl was born. She lived in the country with her mother and father and sister, a cat and a dog and had no idea of fate or destiny. Life just was.

No dolls and playhouses for this girl, she spent her days exploring the freedom that rural New Zealand offered children in the 1960's - people were good (except the neighbour that kept lollies in his car that Mum said she should never accept from him), the roads were safe and happiness was playing with her pets, listening to the kids radio show in the mornings and going to work with her father while he built cowsheds and hay barns, fixed pieces of farm machinery in his enormous workshop and slaughtered sheep. If she was lucky, she was allowed to help with the sheep. Her sister didn't go out killing sheep; she threw up too much.

This girl never felt as if she fitted in, only she didn't understand what was lacking. She was a fat, happy, friendly child, one that had yet to meet the shallow, restrictive criteria that society would one day judge her by. But once she went to school, all that changed. No one likes a fat kid.

Gradually, the taunts and ridicule, the bullying and the exclusion drove her inside herself - she didn't often initiate friendships any more, she didn't know how to respond if others made an overture. She started to look for ulterior motives in the actions of others, and sometimes they were easily found. School was misery, a trial, boringly mundane and always an excuse for someone to put her down, tell her in every way there was that she had no value because she was fat and ugly. She became a clown and learnt to laugh at herself, but the laughing was only on the outside. As she grew, the self-ridicule took on a sharply cynical quality.

She became more introverted and learned to do without the comfort that acceptance and companionship could bring. She became lazy and selfish and her budding self esteem atrophied from lack of use, a lack of light and air and sustenance. She was often sickly, and was castigated for it by her teachers and her family. They said she was making it up; it was all in her head. Some called her a hypochondriac.

The little girl became a teenager without drive or enthusiasm or vision and ambition was just another word in her large, and largely useless vocabulary. She had a couple of very special friends; ones who only saw her inner value, never noticed the ugly shell that protected this great treasure. She carried these friends with her, grew with them and never lost them. Even to this day, she is proud to call them friend and know that, 28 years later, they still love her.

She spent her high school years wagging class to avoid the boredom, the lunchtime bullies, the school bus tormenters, the overwhelming sense of exclusion, failure, stupidity and uselessness that had become her daily existence. At 16, she left school to wander aimlessly through the next 5 years until, at 21, she met the man she would marry, bear two children to and ultimately leave. He didn't love or value her, it just took 12 years to realise that this wasn't going to improve.

She struck out alone, with her kids in tow, looking for the life that had so far passed her by, knowing it had to be out there somewhere; after all it existed for everyone else. But the same old criteria still applied; people don't really like fat and ugly adults around much, either.

She found the courage to leave her cave and learn a new skill. And she was good at it. Not great, not brilliant, but good enough to rank as satisfactory. She found new friends and some were good, she learned to play again and she finally got the chance to live a bit of her teenage years the right way. She fell in love, fell out of love and fell in love again, but it was all a moot point. Life never guarantees reciprocation.

Midway through her training, she became ill. Not enough to stop her, just enough to slow her down and make her feel her hypochondria was rearing it's ugly head. There wasn't really anything wrong, she was just getting lazy again. Then a few months later, she really did get sick, it wasn't all in her head after all (well, actually it was). She had MS.

For a while, life continued on as normal and she had lots of roles to juggle; kids, school, work, homework, school, kids, work, kids. No energy was left over to play any more, it all went into coping with what had to be done and playing wasn't much of a necessity. If she wasn't wearing one of her role-playing hats, she was asleep, recharging her batteries for the next energy-sapping requirement. Her friendships changed as people wandered off in search of new pastimes that didn't involve facing coping with someone in pain, scared and grieving. Some new friendships came to take their place.

Her needs changed. Now, instead of being everyone's shoulder to cry on, she was the one needing the shoulder. Instead of supporting others, she needed the support. But no one was really listening, trying hard but only hearing what they could cope with not hearing what she needed to say, not understanding her confusion, her need to talk and propping her up was not their responsibility to fulfil anyway. Help was there, lots and lots of it at times, but it was sporadic and she came to feel that she could not rely on it, that it wasn't fair to others. It was not their problem, not like it was hers. There wasn't anyone who could be expected, relied upon to give her what she needed and for the first time in her life, she realised how insignificant, redundant and thoroughly alone she really was. And she realised that this, too, would likely never change.

So she cleaned and dusted out the cave she had left so long ago and started redecorating it for a new tenancy, a permanent sojourn this time. She started writing a journal; at first it was random, then it grew to became a focus, an open ended conversation with two or three people and a wider potential audience of many, listening and observing and included as appropriate. In it she wrote all the things she had no one there to listen to, all the things she wanted to have heard. It didn't matter that it existed in a cyber vacuum; it existed, which is more than she felt she did, at times. Those she wished were listening were usually the ones who never got around to reading it, never really tuned in when she needed to be heard, or only heard what they wanted to hear if they did.

Two years have passed since her diagnosis and now she doesn't work much anymore, she doesn't really have a job. She isn't a mother anymore, now a parent whose kids have learnt to be independent and cope without her. She isn't anybody's wife or lover. She is a part time friend, when friends remember her. She can't walk very far or safely climb stairs, she has a lot of pain in her legs and one burns like fire all the time. She has crushing pains in her head, memory loss and cognitive issues, and she can go for days on end without any adult conversation or interaction. Her email consists of Spam, her days consist of sleep, her dreams have been extinguished and she is very frightened.
I am, of course, the little girl and my journal has reached it's conclusion; everything and everyone has a role to play and its role has been played out. It has been my hibernacle through this discontented winter, enveloping and cocooning me and has given me somewhere safe to explore the emotions and thoughts that daily do battle instead of playing on the road under big trucks as I continue to learn about living with the MonSter. But it also gave me no reason to hope that anything would change, that what I needed would arrive in the nick of time to save me from myself. Its protection required a price, that I accept a few realities. It has been blunt, truthful, honest and, even vicious at times, very much like me I guess. Life is like that. It has portrayed my perception of my Truth, my Reality and crudely attempted to document the changes that have been slowly occurring inside me. The fact that most people cannot even see much of a difference in the way my needs have altered really only serves to underline how little those changes have been understood. Or maybe I just did a bloody good job maintaining the face of a, now non-existent status quo. It filled the hole when the world stopped talking back to me, it gave me someone to talk to in the middle of the night when I had so much pain I didn't know how to cope. It rocked me back to sleep when there was no one there to do it for me, but it never came close to competing with the real thing. The real thing doesn't exist for me. After 7 years alone, the nights are cold and quiet. MS isn't contagious, but sometimes you might think it was.

The MonSter will keep on feeding and I'll keep right on bleeding, little ice picks that each day keep chipping away at the me that is slowly receding. Besides, I'm just a bored and boring hypochondriac, everyone knows that.

It doesn't matter in this life who or what the little girl hungers for, thirsts for, desires and needs; fairy tales only come true for other people.

I'll just have to think of something else :-)

~~ Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond. - Pink Floyd ~~

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Pop

I started my new chemo the other day, not one pill once a week, but 1 pill 3 times a week. Sort of "spreading the load" a bit I guess. Seems to be ok so far as far as there have been almost zilch side effects after 3 doses.

It's too soon to see any improvement in my usual symptoms, of course, but I hope that if it's going to happen it hurries up. I continue to deteriorate, bit by bit and day by day. It doesn't engender a lot of hope.

I'm still burning. It still hurts.

I hadn't told Colin that I was on the wagon and he came around with some rum yesterday. I could have got quite happily pissed with him if alcohol wasn't verboten on the drugs. But I had a tiny drink, couldn't be responsible for the poor man drinking alone now, could I? Besides, it sounded like a bloody good idea.

~~ Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca ~~

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