Time flies ... sometimes

If I could chose which days would seem to pass so quickly, of course it would be the ones that are the most painful, the loneliest, the most frustrating, the ones that are just in general "bad." Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

I suppose as you get older time seems to pass more quickly, when you have things you wanted to do in your lifetime and you see more of your life behind you than ahead of you. Time is a strange thing - you can't control it, it moves at the same rate always, but its speed seems to fluctuate often depending on what you are doing or the frame of mind you're in.

In just a couple of weeks, it will be ten years since I started a group for people in my community who have the same disorder I have. I remember that first meeting like it was only yesterday. I had never met or seen anyone else who has the disorder I have, so I had no idea what to expect. I wondered - would they look like me? would they have the same physical and medical problems I had? would I be much worse because of the disorder than any of them? I had only learned that there was a foundation for the disorder, and that there were even other people around who also had it, just a few months prior to setting up this first meeting. I still didn't know many facts about the disorder, but I knew that if other people had it and had gone through what I had, it would be helpful to have a group of people who understood what it was like.

I had never organized a group before, for any reason, and I was very nervous. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do or what I was supposed to say. As the individuals arrived I saw that they all looked as different as any 10 people randomly chosen from the population would. But, when we started to talk about ourselves and our lives with the disorder, so many experiences were the same - - not necessarily the medical problems we had experienced, but the frustration with physicians, the lack of knowledge about the disorder by medical professionals in general, the frustration at not being able to do some of the things your friends and classmates growing up could do and not knowing how to make them or the teachers understand why.

Can it really be 10 years since that first meeting? We have had members come and go. We have lost two members from death due to the disorder. But, there is a core group of people who have stuck it out from the beginning; we have become like family. We have gone through really difficult times and through times of fun. We have laughed a lot and cried a lot. But we have had a common goal - trying to make the lives of other people with the disorder a little better, a little easier than ours have been.