Breaks on my Life

I miss driving the most from my former normal life, no contest. I loved driving so intensely... indubitably I inherited the I-heart-to-drive gene from my grandfather by way of my mother.

I cherished the 8-hour round trip journeys from school to home, which seemed to last a few mere minutes as I sipped coffee, noshed on doughnuts, and sang my head off to Rent, Wicked, or Hairspray.

For me, driving was therapeutic. Were I ever stressed out from school or whatever new family drama there was sure to be (Mama and I had just learned about The Affair between Wicked Stepfather and my sister a year before I went off to college, so twas still pretty fresh), I'd hop into my car and invariably I'd feel a bit saner after a quick spin.

My friends at college would joke about what a bad driver I was, but actually I used to be a pretty decent one. I didn't get a ticket until five years after I got my license, which is incidentally when I started getting them regularly because my driving was regressing. I laughed along with the others but I was sick inside because I knew, deep in my secret soul, that this was HD, eating away at my brain and screwing up my reflexes and causing me to drive sporadically.

I was heading down the mountain (the campus was located on the crest of Lookout Mountain)  one evening senior year and lost control, spinning around on the road and almost going off the cliff. Luckily nobody was coming up on the other lane or somebody might've been killed. I wasn't scared in the least, just enraged since I knew that my ability to drive would soon be lost forever.

The day that my neurologist informed me casually that, by the way, "you probably shouldn't be driving anymore" was the moment in which I knew my life as I knew it was over at the ripe old age of 26. I had no choice but to move back home.

Ways that Huntington's disease devastated my life, #1

I have always been passionate about music: I played the piano and the flute, but what I loved most of all was singing. I had a fantastically average voice, tis true, but my mother has an ethereal voice, had been a voice major in college, and I assumed as I got older, I'd blossom into a lovely vocalist myself.

Yeah, didn't happen. I even took voice lessons - all for naught.  I got into an amazing  choir that occasionally was accompanied by the local symphony only because I was adept at sight-reading.

My flute-playing was subpar at best: Mama had always loved the trilling sounds of the instrument and had gotten one, intending on learning to play but never doing so. I tried to teach myself how to play, which was to my detriment.  Years later I took some lessons and got to sounding a  bit better, but I never got sliver tones in the least.

But the piano, now there was my wheelhouse. I played for a couple of hours at least every day and could always express my feelings, whatever they may be. The afternoon of Black Sunday (when I found out the Wicked Stepfather and one of my sisters had been involved sexually), I took my grief and poured it into Rubenstein's Romance, and it sounded so wistful and haunting.

I was a piano minor in college up until all the practice affected my hands and it was too painful for me to even type. My teacher told me carpel tunnel and that I should get fitted for casts, but I knew in my bones that this was HD, even thought I hadn't been tested yet, and I just switched my minor to English.

Now, ten years later, I can't even bring myself to play...I'm so bad that it's too tragic.