Huge

Everything has changed size.

From my point of view, that is.

It began at my 25th college reunion... walking around parts of the campus and saying to myself, "I thought this was a long walk?" It was more pronounced at my 30th last May, and it was something that my classmates all felt... Yale had become "Hogwarts shrunk to the size of a snow-globe." It was tiny. Even from the perspective of someone in a wheelchair (that'd be me), it was ... Dinky.

Same with my former workplace... I drive past it on the freeway from time to time, and I think, that's all it is? It's... tiny.

You never feel like it's tiny when you're trying to schlep stuff from one end of it to the other, I'll be the first to tell you that. And from a fifth-grader's perspective (my age when I first set foot on it), it's huge. Once I had been ... accessorized, let's say, it was too damned big; but with the powered wheelchair, it was just fine.

But now, as I drive by it... it's small.

Once simple home-care tasks have grown. They're all huge. Sometimes insurmountable. "I need to clean up the studio" has always been a bigger-than-fun-to-do task for everyone, but nowadays... it's huge. Too huge. What would have been a two-hour-at-worst job (move that, reconnect that, put the first thing back, handle the needs-doing stuff that was revealed by the whole process), easily done when the proper tunes were put on the stereo, is... completely impossible, somehow. There's always something "in the way" (sometimes very much so, as in "in the way, on the floor, in front of the thing you'd hope to spend  your time on") that needs doing before you can get at the thing you actually wanted to do.

This has always been a problem. This is a problem for everyone, I know... I can't fix the X until I fix the Y, but I can't even get at the Y until I process the Z properly, there are reams of self-improvement/encouragement books offering solutions to the "can't clean because too many things are dirty" conundrum. But not for we M.S.ers, for whom "there's only so much energy" governs, impedes, causes to die on the vine, everything we do.

I forget which Famous Industrialist held this particular rule as the magical principle that revitalized his "empire," but it was just this: Do the most important thing first.

A nice idea. Works fine when there's available energy. But right now... given that I have to drive an hour to my doctor to have today's "killing fatigue" addressed, the most important thing is, I think, going to be... lie down. Then set the alarm so I don't sleep through driving to my appointment.

And needing to lie down, right now, has become "the elephant in the room." From the mouse's point of view, or from the perspective of anyone being battered by its mass, this is ...

Huge.