Brain Damage

When I was young, I was shy and modest.

"Impossible," you scoff. "You're a vulgar inappropriate whore who barfs up all her business on to the internet."

"Harsh, but true," I say. "Yet both statements are accurate."

In my youth I was always modest: shying from attention in my childhood bathing suit, covering my chest with a flannel shirt after puberty, closeting my honeymoon bikini when I was first married. I never cursed. I couldn't tell a dirty joke even when my Mom said it was okay. And I kept everything a secret, even the most innocent little sins.

That was my youth. Then, according to one of my friends, "Ellen got MS and just said, fuck it."

Initially, I thought it was because of the steroids. Steroids loosened my tongue and I couldn't stop talking to everyone, strangers, tell everyone about this new diagnosis, who cares, I love everyone, and, let me tell you about my bowels.

But the steroids wore off and the new personality stayed.

It now think that when I got MS, the lesion that put me in the hospital pushed me into a new level of brain damage. See this study that looks at how people with MS start to have certain personality traits. 

Traits like:

• social inappropriateness (I have learned to start all work conversations with "I'm sorry if this is inappropriate, but ...")
• disinhibition (naked on a cruise, sign me up)
• apathy (not so much this one)
• emotional lability (I truly got so mad at Gary this morning I wet myself, Botox or not)
• impulsivity (compulsive blurting so much that I need to funnel it into this blog)

And surprisingly, Gary stuck around for both versions of me. 

Comments

[KC]

Fascinating. I do not have MS and am just weird with personality aspects that people think don't go together, but I have been like that since I was a teenager or so. (Did I enjoy ballet? Yes. Was I extremely quiet and bookish and gangly? Yes. Did I enjoy telling my ballet teacher that I'd need to go easy on one of my knees that day because a sledgehammer handle had rebounded against it when I hit some rebar while breaking up concrete? Also yes. Did most people not know either of those things about me? Also yes. I do not feel the need to tell everyone everything, but it occasionally amuses me to subvert people's expectations with facts.)

I think a lot of women grow into not being spooked "nice girls" though, even without MS, so there is that. And chronic illness in general means that either you totally hide a giant area of your life ooooor you tell people at least a few things that are not socially normal to say, and once you're doing that, you may as well tell them other things. But yeah, brain changes are also plausible!

(in any event, the blog version of you is awesome, so there is that. I do appreciate that Gary has adhered to both versions of you, though! Has he changed at all, aside from construction dust reactions?)

[theQueen]

KC - Hmm - he wakes up as a new person, frankly, depending on the humidity. (Humidity really affects his epilepsy, so somedays he's not so sharp and really agreeable, then somedays he's full of thoughts he has to express and can't stand to be interrupted.)