A new year still brings forward challenges from the last but as is most things in life they can be endured with a heavy dose of attitude. My name is Lore and I love to create. I love to create almost anything – even the odd argument [but shush!]. I love to write and adore my pets (Elliot, Keats and Bronte). I also have three chronic conditions; Lupus (SLE), Sjogren’s Syndrome, Fibromyalgia. My conditions make a ‘normal’ life impossible but I still foolishly and with much pain try to keep up with the ‘normals’. But why am I struggling to accept that I am ‘different’? Probably because the weird stuff I do is not cute, kooky or gloriously eccentric but just plain weird.

The ‘grey fog’ that broods in my brain and takes over my body makes me look  like an extra from the Dawn of the Dead and causes me to have panic attacks in a supermarket as I cannot process choices and follow the procedures of basic everyday tasks. Supermarkets are particularly distressing, as in an absolutely unfathomable way, I cannot face the freezer aisles. As I approach the chilled section I can feel my bones tighten and muscles twitch as the stark change in temperature convinces my freak of a body that it is not in Morrisons, England but base camp in the Antarctic and by the time I make it to the freezer aisle I am in agony. The freezer aisle makes me physically sick! Weird huh? That damn ‘fibro fog’ also makes this girl not understand left from right, unable even to follow the simplest form of conversation that polite society is formed on – the weather! “Horrible weather isn’t it? “Is it?” “Rain again” “Rain? It’s raining?…Why am I at a bus stop? I’m sure I came in a car…didn’t I?.. What did I come out for?.. Rain! You were saying…?”.

The fog (at least I hope it’s the fog) makes me think that my bedroom is the kitchen and that the bedside cabinet is the fridge. The fog is also why some people look at me agog as I’m struggling to join up the words that are scattered in my head. People look as tortured as I feel as my responses to them are laboured and have a long delay. I may as well be on another planet, messages take a long time in arriving and meanings get lost in translation and I already feel that I wasn’t quite built for this world. So if I cannot fit myself to this world I will set about creating a new one.

I have got a little carried away. Apologies. I hope not to take up too much space moaning and share more frivolous things such as my  beauty product hoarding and all those pretty things in life that I cling to to brighten up the fog and distract from the thunder and lightening of the other symptoms.