Hello, beautiful people. It's been a while. I kind of disappeared. And that's because I got very sick.

Nothing life-threatening, but definitely life-changing. What happened, long story short, is that I lost my

ability to speak. And yeah, it took a while for it to come back. It's not

back completely. I can still lose my ability to speak for a few seconds or a few minutes even or a

minute here and there throughout the day. So me speaking, me recording here is an investment of a lot of

energy. And yeah, it's good to be back, though. It's good. So why have I lost my ability to speak

at times within episodes throughout my day sometimes. It's because I was

diagnosed, or I have something called FND, functional neurological disorder. And it's a, it's a

crazy, crazy disorder that can cause pretty much anything that is linked to your nervous system. So almost everything, right? And some people,

if you want to compare your body to a machine, which I don't like, but a stroke, having a stroke

would be a hardware problem. You get brain damage. F&D is like a software problem. It's a problem with the nervous

system and the brain networks. It's like a connection problem. And yeah, that's what happened to me.

It was triggered by intense pain from a herniated disc in my neck. And it changed my life overnight completely. I had to stay in bed all the time because I was so

tired and everything would trigger symptoms, symptoms. And I've had to learn more about my diagnosis. I've had to learn how to regulate

my nervous system. I've had to learn how to respond to functional seizures, which are episodes of

my body just shutting down, like having a full connection problem and being kind of like paralyzed

while conscious.

So, yeah, I've had to adapt, adapt, adapt, adapt, adapt, and rest lots.

And slowly, slowly work toward being able to speak like I am now,

being able to move around a bit more, to having some

outing now and then, and, yeah, to regulating my nervous system nonstop. As I'm speaking, I am holding

a fidget, an entirely quiet fidget, and that is something

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