Anika’s Pick of the Week 2

Hello everyone, Anika here. I just want to apologize for the second one being so much later than a week. Mentally, I was not in a good place, so I was struggling to communicate even with my family. It was getting exceedingly hard to have anything to communicate and not be able to, by voice or writing. Because whenever this kind of thing happens, everything and every way you do it normally vanishes.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a country where they didn’t understand any of your efforts at conversation, and there’s no sign language or Braille to help you? Because even if you did know them, they would not. And the words that you thought in usually were just, well, gone.

And you don’t have that liberty. It’s taken from you. Quite truthfully, I was wondering if I was developing dementia or amnesia because it takes so much effort to do every blasted thing. And I will admit it’s a scary place to be. It’s quite exhausting.

But then I remembered a friend of mine who had broken his back at 25 and remained in a wheelchair. If he starts getting like that, his wife gets an antibiotic for him because she knows he has a bladder infection, and he will swear blind he does not have one. She tells him to take the tablets, and he told me that she (so far) had always been right.

However, I had been going through a lot of different medical issues. I just wanted to be normal and get up and go to bed at a normal time. Here I was having to be poorly! I basically wanted to live a life I don’t have and will never have because it’s not the one I am meant to have.

Communication is the best tool you have and can ever expect to have with your fellow men and women. But that can be a slippery eel at the best of times. Truthfully, it all started to come into my mind as a mishmash of ideas that form the nucleus of a concept in you, and you suddenly think, “OMG! That’s it! That’s what’s been going on with me.”

I was concerned that you, my friend, will not understand as it is written here. But please, don’t dismiss it. This is something you might go through with one of your relatives, so it’s important to remember.

TREASURE

For me, my treasure has been that my two boys/men in my life have been so patient with me, allowing me to try and try again until they understood what I wanted or was trying to communicate to them. It can be as hard on the other people in your family and life.