Empathy

An article from the Guardian stirs up some memories

It's striking how little I empathise with the authors predicament. It says much about how I relate to the world that I was most aware of my facial paralysis when dealing with it myself: looking in the mirror, stumbling over words and accidentally biting my lips because they no longer worked as they once did.

How other people saw me didn't concern me, though I think I may have made a conscious decision early on. Why bother with, or try to hide from something so out with my control?

It's a small frustration to me that things never went back to being quite the same as they were before. A good portion of the right side of my face remains numb, and I can see the difference around the right side of my lips, though I'm likely the only one. It was disturbing at first - it drove home the unconsidered intimacy we share with our faces - but fortunately, it is only a small frustration. As with many of life's troubles, it's magnitude lessened with time until became no more than an afterthought stirred by errant newspaper articles.