Trail Of Light.

I can't believe how soon the end of this year has approached us! So quickly and so much has happened personally as well as globally. Crazy talk! Well, I think it is safe to say that it has been a real year of mental progression and self-development. The year started as early months of heavy lows and true sadness for what I felt I had lost. At the time, it was hard to see past the new label that I felt trapped by and I was blinkered by MS as a disease. It felt like this new thing was out to destroy me, without permission and I had no choice but to surrender. Unless you've ever received news like this, that you have to cope with daily, knowing you can't change the fact it is permanent, you have no idea what it is to chew yourself up about it. I have been lucky enough to come into contact and befriend people in similar circumstances, that have to live with life-long conditions and they have inspired me, pushed me and motivated me endlessly and for that I am so grateful. To a...

12 months. A year. And how things can change in a heartbeat. We never think it is going to be us, but we just hear about others suffering and think “oh, that’s sad”, and just kind of carry on. I realise we can’t take everything on our shoulders and I’m not saying we should at all, but we don’t know what it is to be “normal” until things shift. It has taken me 12 months to re-establish what it means to be “normal” and the biggest realisation I had is that it is not this blanket term that we think encompasses the majority. Nor is it a template for us to all work around and mould ourselves into. The reality is, this kind of normality does not exist. But what does exist is what exists for us daily, in our personal experience. I’ve been working on finding my new kind of normal and a way of living that suits me. It’s not always easy and on a rough day, it can be hard not to be angry and draw comparisons to others, but we are all human and just because someone hasn’t got your problem, do...

I’ve been a bit slow off the mark with writing recently and for that I am apologetic. I’ve been out and about on many an adventure and when the opportunity occurs, I’m afraid I just drop everything else. That’s probably something I’ve been doing a lot more since the start off this year and I’m not so sure it is such a bad thing. Importantly, it is about jumping headfirst into life for the right reasons; doing it not out of fear, but out of a wish to savour the present. I will admit that initially, it may have been fear-driven – I had just been diagnosed and I had done enough sitting around in waiting rooms only focusing on pain and the churning feeling that things may never be the same again. Actually, thinking about it, I was right about one thing and that was that things would never be the same again. Is that such a bad thing? Well, I won’t pretend there were no cycles of loss and mourning for what I had lost (which was mostly certainty to be honest) and what I was preparing myself ...

Though it may not seem like it to those who know me, I've officially been forced to slow down. Nothing major, but I've basically had a cold for 5 weeks, which isn't exactly normal but I suppose to be expected if you're taking immunosuppressants. It's a double-edged sword really. You have to take them to prevent your immune system from attacking all the healthy bits but in turn, your immune system has been muffled so you catch everything and take a lot longer to recover. I swear I'm not complaining, I'm so glad it's a bunged up nose and chest and not anything more severe. I literally called to suspend my gym membership before I got typing (you don't know how much that pains me, it's where I find my calm) just so I'm not tempted to head back to the gym before I have fully recovered. To be fair, I have only really just taken some action to slow down, begrudgingly and have been dashing around and about for the last three weeks, not really sitting...

It was only earlier this year that I completed my second course on counselling and I was taking a moment to reflect today and one thing popped into my head; thoughts aren't facts. This should not be revelation, it is merely a statement of facts but it is something that I forget all the time. It is so easy to let my mind run away with itself, creating story lines and conclusions that haven't happened yet and may not ever. Yet I'll let myself get so worried or wound up about such thoughts, creating unnecessary stress for myself and for those that get wind of what I'm letting churn up in my stomach. Whether its to do with my health and the doctors or social situations, it is something that can create a level of annoyance and anxiety that's enough to drive anyone nuts. I've noticed how stress can manifest itself in such physical ways. It can lead to headaches, feeling sick and lack of appetite. Having MS, it can mean altered vision, loss or reduced feeling in hand...

It's been a few weeks since I've written, but I've been so busy. My cold stuck around for a lot longer than anticipated and I've been away with work. Very very busy few weeks, but hello! I can't believe we are drawing towards those last few months of the year and to the point where a lot of us start to look back. I was sat talking to a friend about where I was back in January and where I stand right now in my life. It's crazy, the first four months of this year were the darkest and longest I've felt in my life and that's not just because it was wintery and cold. I was at a point of real hopelessness and anyone that knows me will tell you that isn't the kind of person I am. I just felt so alone in it all after diagnosis and as if everything I had ever wanted was so longer possible. I felt so deeply afraid and angry at the world, asking myself how I could have prevented myself from having MS, if I could have done some things differently so I wouldn...

It's officially cold season. My first cold of the autumn has arrived and it feels...horrible haha! No surprises there! But as an MS sufferer it's a bit of a drag on the old immune system. It's an achy body x10 compared to the average Joe and it is literally an effort to stay awake. However, not all is terrible and I see this as a chance to practice some much needed self-compassion and self-care. I push myself into overdrive most of the time. Between working, exercising, volunteering and travelling around and about, I don't really leave much time to just chill out. Actually, it was something I had to schedule into my diary last Sunday, but I managed to find other things I really needed to do. This is probably most of us, not really slowing down until we really have to and even then, kind of ignoring our needs to the point of crumbling. This was a real exercise of knowing my boundaries and  think this time I'll commend myself for cutting the gym and sentencing myself ...

There is nothing more that I enjoy (other than eating cake) more than exercising. I love it, no joke. I get such a buzz from working hard and pushing my body to the limits. Seeing yourself being able to go that extra distance and lift heavier weights over time is a real achievement. I feel like keeping active has become more important for me since diagnosis. I realised that if I kept strong for all the time I was well, then if something was to happen I could recover more quickly. From a mental health perspective, that gave me a sense of being able to control, to some extent, my own condition. Ok, so I can't decide when I'll relapse or how it will last for, but I have the power to keep physically strong and battle through. With exercise, it's really not about doing loads. It's about listening to your body and doing what feels right for you. For some time, I got so down about the fact that I couldn't feel my arm that it was hard to stay motivated. But actually, the ...

As we all get back to routine after balmy long summer days of peach sunsets, it's easy to end up getting bogged down being back at work. For me, it's hard not to get down about the end of summer, I wait for it all year. After all, days are longer, the necessity for a billion layers no longer stands and watermelon and ice cream is all that is on the agenda. To say I spend to time looking back at summer snapshots and basking in the nostalgia of vaguely warm weather would be an understatement. The question to be asked here, is what to do when getting back into routine of working stresses and keep myself healthy and happy? Well here's the thing, I did a series of amazing workshops at work around mindfulness and resilience and how we can keep our "bags light" when we seem to be going uphill. It changed my perspective on how well I actually look after myself and what I do in terms of emotional/mental self-care. With the busy lives we lead and days drawing to a sh...

So, I am forever looking up the benefits of eating various foods and taking different supplements  and whether they are actually doing me any good at all. There has been a recent hype over clean/raw foods and it's easy to fall into the superfood phenomena, willing every morsel that passes our lips to be of some benefit to our body- especially since it can cost us a fortune. As you can imagine, I was delighted when Channel 4 released a programme called "Superfoods: The Real Story" , that gave viewers insight into foods that have been sat in the spotlight as life changing and looking into whether they are really as amazing as they are painted to be. Particularly since diagnosis, I've been more conscious of what I put into my body and though none of these foods will get rid of the dreaded lesions, keeping my body in tip-top shape can only help keep me as strong as possible enabling a speedier recovery from potential relapse. At the end if this blog I'll put in a bunc...

Wow! So an amazing response to this over the weekend. I can't believe how many of you have showed such incredible support for this project and I can't wait to see how many people this can reach! I thought I would take the time to post about my weekend and travel. Most of my friends aren't based around where I live so most of my journeys tend to span over a few days and via train travel. The most common issue that people with MS struggle with fatigue. Some research suggests that could be down to the way the body responds to coping with MS and factors such as heat (and boy, can I vouch for that one, with or without a condition!) and medication could also play a part. So for me, travel needs to be a) light b) organised and c) as stress free as possible. A) Light It is so important to travel light and by cutting back on the unnecessary, it helps me to conserve energy that I want to spend on something other than my overnight bag. I'm getting pretty good at ditching my ...

Hello everyone,  I'm not sure who's reading this or if anyone is at all but I'm going to give this a whizz. My name is Noor. I'm 23 years old and I was diagnosed with Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis back in December 2014. MS is an autoimmune condition which means your immune system starts attacking healthy body tissue. With MS, it destroys the protective sheaths around your nerves in your brain. This in turn disrupts signals trying to get the brain, leading to various symptoms which differ from person to person. It can lead to spasticity in different parts of the body, visual loss or disturbance and fatigue. I'd never really heard of MS pre-diagnosis and wasn't really familiar with what impact it could have on my body. I found it very scary taking in all this information and I can't say it was easy to accept what the doctors were saying. I was talking to a friend yesterday about how much I had wished I'd had someone my age to speak to when I...