PURPOSEFUL DISTRACTION

A decade before the diagnosis, I already knew.

I found the page in an old notebook from October 22, over ten years back. I no longer recognize the handwriting. I recognize the man. He writes about creativity like it's a stranger he keeps missing. I name what scares me now with precision: purposeful distraction. He knew, even then, that the noise wasn't an accident. Music turned up loud enough to drown out a question. Games for hours. Movies. Even reading, the one thing that should have fed the work, weaponized against it instead.

I used to think that was a character flaw. Now I know it was fear wearing a disguise. I know what it feared: finishing something and finding out it wasn't enough. It's easier to stay envious of other people's output than to risk producing your own and discovering its ceiling.

The man in 2011 didn't know what I know now. The body keeps score on avoided work. I didn't choose to stop distracting myself. Multiple Sclerosis chose it for me. When your hands don't always do what you tell them, when fatigue can end a day before noon, purposeful distraction stops being a strategy. It becomes a debt you can't afford anymore.

MS didn't give me discipline. It repossessed the time I'd spent pretending I had unlimited amounts of it.

I call my diagnosis a line of demarcation because that's exactly what it was. Not a wall. A border crossing. Before it, I had the comic book artist's hands and no urgency. After it, I have fewer hands and no time left to convince myself the world-building instinct in me was a phase. It was never about the panels. I said that in 2011 and didn't believe myself yet. I believe it now: creation of worlds is the most excited I have ever been by anything, and a world is not a place. It's someone's story told in unbearable detail. Mine included.

My faith tells me strength isn't the absence of the limp. Brené Brown names the same truth in different language: strength is the courage to admit you can't power through, and to adapt instead. For years I thought managing MS was a smaller life. It's the opposite. It's the only reason Sauti Global exists. It's the only reason "Forty Lesions, Forty Lessons" has a spine instead of just a wound. Every lesion is a scar where a detour used to be. I'm not writing around the diagnosis anymore. I'm writing from it, because it's the only credential that was ever true.

The 2011 entry ends mid-sentence. I get pulled away by my son's outburst at a soccer game, distracted from an essay about distraction, proving my own point without meaning to.

Purposeful distraction was. One steals your hours without permission. The other, a son needing his father mid-sentence, isn't distraction at all. That's the point of having hours in the first place.

I am the author of this story now, not just a character living through it. That's the whole difference between 2011 and today. The diagnosis didn't write a better chapter for me. It handed me the pen back.